Digital Delights and Disturbances: Ameera Kawash on the Decolonization of AI

On October 24th, John Cabot University welcomed Ameera Kawash for a talk called "Can AI Be Decolonized?". The event was part of the Fall 2024 edition of the Digital Delights and Disturbances (DDD) lecture series. Kawash is a Palestinian-Iraqi American researcher and artist who utilizes AI to offset its colonial effects on marginalized communities.

In her talk, Kawash explained how AI systems, especially generative models, frequently erase or distort Palestinian narratives, widening the digital divide and perpetuating digital dehumanization. She pushes for a reimagined AI that actively supports minority stories and creates new ways to improve/ensure social justice.

AI has become "the contemporary of digital colonialism." Image generators and machine learning algorithms are not objective, they reflect preconceptions, prejudices and biases while contributing to inequalities in the data and creators fueling them. "AI generated images are creating new forms of image violence and engaging in digital dehumanization bias and shaping how politically oriented violence is consumed and circulated," said Kawash. This phenomenon is not only limited to image generators: these AI technologies are also integrated into military operations, coordinating with surveillance systems and drones in Gaza. She noted that these technologies embody what is called "digital dehumanization," the reduction of people to data points and an "epistemicide" of entire ways of being and knowing. "AI continues to influence global narratives, particularly through the creation of synthetic realism, and it has potential to significantly contribute to dehumanization, discrimination, and the denial of atrocities. It can be a tool of active complicity," Kawash stated.

Kawash identified the risks associated with AI, but she also saw the possibility for subversion of these systems. She is a promoter of the ethical application of AI, taking into account the viewpoints of the Global South and minorities, and argued that the lives and experiences of marginalized people must be at the center of AI's demilitarization and repurpose with global accountability.

To demonstrate that AI can also support and validate these narratives, Kawash created a digital archive that preserves Palestinian cultural symbols and stories. By training AI models on native plants and embroidery patterns for her project Tatreez Garden, cultural heritage is promoted rather than destroyed. Kawash's approach to AI rejects the duality between technology and tradition. She maintains that tradition and rituals are types of technology on their own and that by adding these components into AI, technology may honor them. Her research demonstrates that AI has the capacity to store not only data but also future possibilities and is a tool to amplify and preserve marginalized histories.

Kawash encourages us to consider how AI may serve not as a tool of digital colonialism but as a driver for global justice. "We need to hope, we need to participate with our love and our rage, and we need to transform this system," she concluded.

The Digital Delights and Disturbances series will continue on November 13th with the event titled "Black Digital Currents."