Since the recent rise in popularity in the use of generative AI, a number of scholars have tried to conceive of ways in which it could be beneficial to decolonial motives. This essay is a short reflection on the intersection between these two fields and their adopters. I am particularly concerned here with what questions are raised at that intersection and what those tell us about the nature of human existence in the modern world.
First to clarify terms. In the context of this short essay, I am thinking about a narrow band of Artificial Intelligence, while still commenting on the idea that computers can in any way simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity and autonomy. In particular, I am interested in the ways it is suggested that computer technology can autonomously simulate and originate genuinely human approaches to teaching, research and administration. This is because the use of generative AI begins to produce widespread controversy when it is argued that AI can do things like write an original academic article or design bespoke teaching. In essence what is in question is the idea that AI can replicate human thinking and not just assist it. This also overlaps with the question of whether, in the academic field, things like essays and teaching are merely useful products or also inherently useful processes.
The speed at which computers work has always been an attractive aspect of their use. This is important when our institutions demand more work out of us in the same amount of time. So, people interested in bringing decolonisation into the university sector have sometimes suggested that AI’s speed could result in increased accessibility to and analysis of information and archives that are out of reach of marginalised communities. Additionally, AI could helppreserve dying languages impacted by the colonial project. It could also aid in decolonising museum collections which contain artefacts stolen and/or taking during colonial occupation. These sound like admirable goals. But are they wholly decolonial ones in the context of AI use?
It is important at the point to outline what decolonisation means, at least for this author. It is often the case that discussions of decolonisation focus mainly on concepts such as equality, diversity, inclusion, and representation. These are definitely good goals and tools for our institutions, but do they amount to decolonisation if we do not disrupt the significant harm that the colonial project has enacted and, in many ways, continues to enact? I suggest that it is impossible to even begin to effectively engage with the project of decolonisation, if we do not understand quite clearly the structure of the project it responds to and seeks to dismantle – colonialism. Colonialism is driven by logics of extraction, exploitation and dispossession. Exploitative and extractive empires introduced in the late modern European period are those characterised by the logics of commodification of space and nature, as well as (through the manufacture of the social category of race) the commodification of humanity and variably valued labour. Built on these overarching logics is the mostly racial and gendered categorisation and hierarchization of peoples into those who labour and those who benefit from that labour. Colonialism is thus a world-making project, and the ontology of Euro-modern law assists the enduring reproduction of this project. What I mean is that within Euro-modern law, bodies and space-time are revalued and redefined to meet the needs of enclosure, property-making and, and capital accumulation. What it means to be human. What is means to exist on the earth. What it means to pass through time. All these are determined by the perpetual motion of the extractive colonial machine.
What then is decolonisation? Decolonisation can be described as the long-term and continuous refusal of colonial practices and effects, which has manifested differently in different parts of the world. In other words, decolonisation is not one thing, but a set of context-dependent strategies, adopted by those resisting colonialism – strategies specifically relevant to the particular ways in which colonial ideologies manifest themselves in those particular places. In practice, this has often involved, indigenous peoples, colonised peoples and racialised peoples, taking up the tools that they have, to resist the specific forms of oppression that they experience at the time that they experience it. This includes demanding sovereignty, reclaiming autonomy over being and resources, as well as reviving lost epistemologies.
What then do we find at the intersection of AI and decolonisation? And why do some people hate AI so much? First, GenAI promises more than it delivers. In fact, it promises a very different thing from what it actually delivers. It is important to be clear on what GenAI is doing in academia. It is not thinking, it is simulating. It is not creating, it is replicating. It is not sentient so it cannot be creative or imaginative. It cannot feel or think. It lies a lot of the time. It very often relies on stealing intellectual property and human/natural resource use and abuse that has hit those already marginalised by the colonial project the worst. It simulates already existing human thinking, so it replicates and sometimes deepens already existing bias in deeply misogynist and racist ways. There are also many documented cases where people who use it have been encouraged by it to take their own lives. If any other office appliance did so much harm, it would have been chucked out of the window. Yet we talk about GenAI like it is human and inevitable, as if it can blur the lines between human and machine, between human beings and office tools.
We must remember that one of the devices of the colonial project was to make being human for most of the world an unattainable goal. Decolonisation, as an anticolonial approach, tells us that we can reclaim being human again, we can reclaim the earth and we can reclaim time – not in extractive, destructive ways but in flourishing ways. Thus, being genuinely human means being in community with each other and all living things. Being human once more is active and that action evolves by constant caring relation with other beings and the earth upon which we all currently precariously survive. It relies on the non-exploitative reclamation of land and time. So, that we have space to grow and time to slow down and think and create. Together. For each other. For all of us. So that we can together dream of new, flourishing and beautiful anticolonial worlds from within our institutions.
Through, environmental devastation, massive inequality and all forms of violence, survival is being threatened on a planetary scale. To survive, we desperately need new ways of thinking, doing and being in the world. The world needs a body of knowledge that gives us a way “to see, to hurt, to feel, but also a way to dream, to move, to sit still. To live in relation and not possession. A way to be.” To be. To be human. Still. Despite everything.
Reclaiming our collective humanity is achieved not by abdicating our responsibility to think to office equipment or a lying word-juggling machine.
Many thanks to all of our collaborators for taking the time to contribute to this series.
View the other posts in this series here: https://bilt.online/category/decolonising/decolonising-ai/
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