The Blind Eye: When corpos shove AI and make a hit-or-miss junk ruining grassroot efforts

Ah, who doesn't love seeing the lake and powergrid draining lie generator slowly seep into every aspect of our lives, needed or not, enshittifying whatever remains after DRMs and Tethering?

But what if I told you this was happening all along, way before LLMs were a thing, with something we all use pretty much use daily but can't live without, effectively ensuring one returns home safe, and disaster management efforts be carried out effectively? Join this session for a dive into how Meta and RMSI’s AI-assisted road mapping initiative turned OpenStreetMap data in India a dumping ground for Big Tech's failed AI experiments, affecting the Global South to this day.

We’ll unpack how over-reliance on AI's hallucinations, skipped QA checks, and outright dismissal of local communities led to phantom roads, and why this isn’t just a tech fail, but a slap in the face to the collective efforts of grassroots mappers, and effectively rendering OSM unusable to an extent by polluting the project with junk data, as well as the fight back with more recent projects like Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team's fAIr are bringing the very tools to the community, aiding with mapping efforts in a responsible way.

• A brief introduction to OpenStreetMap

• Companies involved in improving OSM

• Meta and OSM, and their initiatives

• The event that changed it all. Where did it go wrong, and irrevocably change things for once and for all (or is it?)

• The fight back, and a brief introduction to HOT's fAIr