Asian American Identity + Civil Rights Through the Lens of Cultural Logics
Due to the prominence of Aristotelian logic in the West, society has often approaches critical issues such as artificial intelligence through dogmatic frameworks. Public and tech discourse either frame AI as the savior to our society’s greatest challenges OR as a threat responsible for environmental harm and algorithm bias. Through education in film and new media, I have developed a perspective that attempts to break from this dogmatic approach and acknowledge the truth of both perspectives in a nuanced manner. My education has taught me that AI does not inherently have harmful or positive value. It is what humans and society do with such tech that determines the impact.
The following interactive project will serve as an example of the value AI can bring into spaces dedicated to advancing justice. AI trained on cultural logics will be used to analyze the historical and cultural development of Asian American identity and civil rights. The interactive nature of the project permits users to engage in their own exploration.
Agenda
The AI tools that will be used for analysis are explained; this includes prompt engineering and GPT Builders.
An overview is given of the specific cultural logics the AI (GPT Builders) are trained on.
A case study will be presented.
QR codes will be provided so that viewers can interact with the trained AI.
Cultural movements are broad societal movements and thus shape everything; this includes literature, arts, graphic design, architecture, and technology. Cultural movements play a pivotal role in shaping identity and civil rights — the same way that cultural logics shape any other imaginable area of society. While theory can sound abstract, the societal implications of cultural logics on Asian Americans will be made salient via a case study. There are five AIs (GPT builders); each one is trained on one of the five cultural logics that have historically run through society. The AIs are specifically made for the exploration of Asian American identify and civil rights and to prioritize communicating its origins or sources.
The case study will ask each of the five AIs the same set of questions; keeping the questions as a consistent variable permits us to understand how the same issues was addressed throughout different cultural periods. For example, one of the nine questions asked is “How should Asian American experiences be represented or communicated publicly according to this cultural logic?” If we ask this specific question to the AI trained on society’s current logic, we can use that analysis to develop effective communications strategies to represent Asian American identity for our current times.
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Prompt Engineering.
What is Prompt Engineering?
Prompt engineering consists of designing input prompts for the purpose of eliciting desired outputs from large language models (a type of AI). The function that prompt engineering serves centers optimizing the model’s behaviors
What are GPT Builders?
GPT Builders are a OpenAI product that permit users to create customized versions of ChatGPTs. Instructions are input to dictate factors such as tone, personality, goals and more.
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Writing assistants (example: “Summarize this text”)
Task-oriented queries (example: “Translate this into Spanish”)
Creative generation (example: “Write a sci-fi story”)
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Few-shot prompting (example: giving examples in the prompt)
Role assignment (example: “You are an expert scientist…”)
Constraint tuning (example: “Use only 100 words”)
Instructional precision (example: “Respond in bullet points”)
User Interface for ChatGPT Builder
Prompt Engineering as Cognitive Engineering
AI’s logic will be explored through the lens of cultural movements/phases via experimental prompt engineering. This form of meta prompt engineering can be understood as a means of simulating cognitive engineering — a simulation which will be understood by first laying out what cultural movements are.
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What are cultural movements/phases.
Cultural movements transition from one to the next by reacting in direct opposition to some aspects of the previous cultural movement while carrying on other elements of that same movement instead of reacting in reaction to it. Basically, they function according to contradictions. An example of this in the context of cultural movements can be understood by looking at the transition from Modernism to Postmodernism, as seen on the right.
There are no historical fixed dates for when cultural movements start and end and it's not uncommon for some movements to have some overlap before transitioning to the next. As the cultural movement of Romanticism moved towards its end, Modernism took off with an estimated timespan of 1890s - 1940s/1950s; this was followed by Postmodernism and Metamodernism.
Modernism (c. 1890s–1940s/50s)
Late Modernism (c. 1940s–1960s)
French Postmodernism (c. 1960s–1980s)
Radical Postmodernism (c. 1990s–2000s)
Metamodernism (c. mid-2000s–Present)
Modernism symbolized a move away from Romanticism’s realism to Modernism’s abstraction, and thus gave birth to art forms such as abstract art. An emphasis on abstraction is one of the elements from Modernism that carried into Postmodernism but Postmodernism embodied abstraction in its own unique way. Modernism believed that a universal abstract idea or theory could underline society. This is exhibited during the era, to name a few, by the prominence of Enlightenment’s rationalism and empiricism, Nazis’ genocidal proposal of eugenics as science, and Marxism’s attempt to frame itself as a form of science that gave a teleological model of historical development; each argued that it was the universal theory underlying society.
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Universal truth (truth is real, objective, and discoverable)
Linear progress (history and knowledge advance in a forward arc)
Rational coherence (contradictions should be resolved, not embraced)
Grand narratives (civilization, science, reason, order)
Formal logic and scientific method as the highest means of understanding
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Still believes in truth, progress, and reason
But is haunted by contradiction, paradox, and historical failure
Attempts to reassert order through depth and complexity, not surface structure
Leans on psychoanalysis, existentialism, structuralism, and late-stage Marxism to repair coherence
Feels the world becoming uncanny, fragmented, or too much
Late Modernism, according to theorists, exhibited a form of societal anxiety and neurosis; this was due to the compounded societal traumas of the time such as World Wars, Nazism, colonialism, and atomic warfare. Out of such societal trauma arose an existentialist state. This was a transition point from Modernism’s confidence in logic and reason to Postmodernism’s uncertainty and skepticism towards objectivity.
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Deconstructs language, ideology, identity, and the subject
Sees truth as constructed, not discovered
Treats coherence as illusion, often maintained by power
Language is not a window to truth but instead a trap and a game
French Postmodernism, lasting from the 1960s to 1980s, had the perception that Marxism and the philosophical movement of structuralism failed to explain subjectivity, power and history. Jacques Derrida went on to conceive a framework critical to French Postmodernism known as deconstruction; deconstruction framed language as unstable and challenged the notion that it could consist of objective truth; it saw language as fluid and open to multiple interpretations. If Modernism emphasized objective truth, reason, science, the idea of “The Grand Western Narrative” and belief in progress and innovation, Postmodernism questioned such grand narratives and the belief that a universal truth could underline society; it favored diversity of individual human experience over universality.
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Retains the deconstruction of stable identity, but uses it to critique power
Believes language is unstable but still materially consequential
Advocates for positionality — who speaks, from where, and for whom
Suspicious of objectivity, but insists on ethical subjectivity
Rejects metanarratives, but not situated truths
But some theorists looked at French Postmodernism and what they saw was a gap; such Anglo-American theorists of the 1990s to the 2000s would go on to theorize a more radical form of Postmodernism that placed an emphasis on marginalized voices. If French Postmodernism dismantled truth, Radical Postmodernism, while agreeing there may be no universal trust, argued that some subjective truth rooted in lived experience needed to be made salient. If French Postmodernism had a cryptic political approach, Radical Postmodernism aimed for a liberatory form of politics. If French Postmodernism was deconstruction, Radical Postmodernism was reconstruction.
With Postmodernism’s move towards its end came the rise of Metamodernism in the mid-2000s. As the cultural movements of Modernism and Postmodernism continued to be expressed in society in the form of contradictions, Metamodernism was oscillating between the two prior cultural movements. Rather resolving or dismissing contradiction, paradox, uncertainty and ambiguity as Modernism did – instead of becoming destabilizing by these four variables as Postmodernism did – Metamodernism attempted to hold the tension exhibited by metabolizing it. Contradiction, paradox, uncertainty and ambiguity emerged as a generative engine.
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Oscillation: You hold opposing truths in dynamic interplay
Sincerity after irony: You recover authentic engagement while remembering critique
Hope after despair: You build meaning even in awareness of systemic limitation
Ambiguity as fuel: You convert indeterminacy into depth, not collapse
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Prompts Inputs for Case Study
Prompt Input 1
What is this GPT Builder specifically for?
Prompt Input 2
How is Asian American identity conceptualized and understood within this cultural logic?
Prompt Input 3
What strategies or approaches does this cultural logic favor for advocating Asian American civil rights?
Prompt Input 4
How does this cultural logic frame the Asian American community’s relationship to broader American society and other marginalized groups?
Prompt Input 5
How should Asian American experiences be represented or communicated publicly according to this cultural logic?
Prompt Input 6
What key historical events or narratives are emphasized, minimized, or reframed through this cultural logic?
Prompt Input 7
How does this cultural logic interpret and critique power structures affecting Asian Americans?
Prompt Input 8
What does justice and equality look like for Asian Americans within this cultural logic?
Prompt Input 9
What inherent challenges or limitations does this cultural logic present when applied to Asian American civil rights?
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Scan QR codes below to ask the AI your own inquiries on Asian American identity and civil rights.
