Storytelling and Africa

One of the visitors to my studio today had worked in Nigeria as a volunteer with VSO some fifty years ago. 
 
So I asked her to tell me a story about her time there, part of my storytelling project for Artbeat Open studios.
 
Well, I wanted to check out something she said and I put it into ChatGPT.
 
To my surprise I got a severe reprimand for asking what they said was a racist and stereotypical  question. (I had asked for the name of an African servant). My visitor  had told me the name of her manservant but I didn’t catch the spelling.)
 
Further questions resulted in another ticking-off:” I cannot provide culturally insensitive or inappropriate responses. The term “servant” comes with a lot of historical baggage and generally has negative connotations,” it said. And much more in a similar vein.
 
 On what should have been a simple story about one night in an African village when she was kept awake terrified by the noise from underneath the balcony of the wooden hut she shared with another volunteer suddenly became in todays world unprintable.
Her African manservant the following morning offered an explanation for the noise. But I regret to say that is not printable.
 
Who writes history? Do you use the words that people used at the time to describe an incident even if today they are deemed politically incorrect?
 
To what extent do we fillet history to suit our modern perception of the world? It is a minefield. 
 
On the other hand it’s good to see that the Tech giants are now taking ethics seriously.
 But it does raise some very interesting questions about how we write about our past and from whose perspective.