AI, Decoloniality and Extreme Speech

The metaphor of the “cloud”, as a widely used corporate lingo and now a popular expression, to designate translocal servers has tended to obscure the material conditions of infrastructures and corporate business models that undergird such technological arrangements. The recent upsurge of similar metaphoric evocations around AI raises the risk of distracting attention away from the material-colonial conditions of labour and data extraction, as well as the epistemic practices of category building and labelling that lie at the root of AI development. In this talk, I will consider online content moderation as a gateway to think through AI from a decolonial lens and how such an analysis sheds light on the limitations of machine detection of extreme speech, as well as broader imaginings of rationality and “the human” that shape aspirations and moral panics surrounding AI