https://researchguides.library.syr.edu/criticalai
“This guide doesn’t pretend to offer a “solution” to the multiple crises intensified by AI – this techno-solutionist mindset is part of the very logic that got us here in the first place. Instead, it’s a resource for collective study and action, rooted in decolonial, abolitionist, and queerfeminist commitments mobilized against what we call the expanding global order of AI Empire: a network of technologies, infrastructures, ideologies, and power relations that depend on ongoing extraction, exploitation, and exclusion. Mainstream computer science and tech industries have every interest in keeping these systems running and expanding. That’s why we insist on a different lens which not only asks how AI might be “reformed,” but questions whether it should exist in its current form at all. To fully understand the impact of AI, we have to go deeper than surface-level conversations about “bias.” “Bias,” “accuracy,” and “privacy” are just the tip of the AI Empire iceberg. Underneath are the systems that AI helps uphold:
- Labor exploitation: AI depends on ghost work – the hidden, underpaid, and dehumanizing labor that keeps the illusion of “automation” alive, especially in the Global South.
- Environmental destruction: Training and deploying AI models requires enormous amounts of energy and relies on violent extraction of rare earth minerals, which destroys local ecosystems, displaces and dispossesses communities, and worsens their quality of life.
- Distributive, epistemic, and representational violence: AI technologies redistribute power and resources upward, while locking in racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities, and manufacturing new oppressive narratives about who matters and who is disposable.
The goal of this guide is not just to critique, but to spark imagination, action, and transformation. We believe technology should be in service of collective liberation, not domination.
We hope this guide helps you study, organize, and work toward a different world, rooted in justice, care, reciprocity, and solidarity.”
