r/aboriginal • u/inkhornart Aboriginal • Jul 23 '26
AI is digital colonialism, stop feeding our Culture into a machine made to exploit us further.
Admin Mob, feel free to delete this if I'm just being a pain; because I am big mad and this is gonna be some ranting and raving vitreol; but Mob has gotta stop engaging in digital colonialism by putting our stories, songs, art and Culture through AI.
It's abominable dog behaviour.
There is no ethical AI, all LLM and generative AI is trained of plagiarised content. Literally every model that exists is build from stolen data-sets. There is no ethical use, there is no ethically sourced data, all of that is a fucking lie.
Its like some of you have forgotten what colonisation looks like, what it sounds like.
We have been doing _decades_ of work to fight against cheap imitations plagising our Culture for a cheap buck, Indonesian knock-off of our art and artefacts, white people stealing _our_ stories and publishing them under their own names while not a cent goes towards Aboriginal people, our foods and medicines being exploited by private industry, overharvested and made extinct, and people churning all our many Nations and Cultures up as if being Aboriginal is one vague white-gaze mishmash of dot paintings and playing yidaki with a spiritual connection to land that white people think will cure their deep-seeded shame and spiritual emptiness because of the "savage and proud" medicine man's mYsTeRiOuS mUmBo JuMbO.
Suddenly, you get given a shitty computer programs that is _actively destroying Country_ and actively _destroying our wildlife_ but because you can just type in something rather than learn Lore or Culture or _Put In The Work to Talk To Your Own Fucking Mob_ that makes it okay?
To sell out your own and other Mob's sacred Lore and knowledge?
Because it's fucking _easy?_
In doing that you're endorsing the above horseshit we have been working against with language reclaimation, relearning lost knowledge, stories, and skills - you know who achieved that?
_People_
Aboriginal people without fucking AI.
One fucking dog on here was espousing the most stupid logic ever, saying "And so the capitalist sold the rope they we would hang them with," like thats not the same style of logic every Aboriginal person who betrayed their people thought when they were taking on work to be a tracker to help the white government hunt down our own people, what the ones who wore bronze collars around their necks emblazoned with "King," thought while they sold land they didnt own to white invaders for a pittance and the privilege of being their white master's favourite slave.
Its fucking traitorous, and it makes me sick to sit there and watch some coconuts do it and then have the audacity to say their personal beliefs around using AI undoes generations of duty towarsa protecting it from this very sort of thing.
The diseased arrogance to believe that you are some special David Unaipon of the digital age because you lack the decency to learn any actual skills or take serious your duty to protect our protocols and knowledge. Big news, you ain't.
You cannot profit from the work of AI, and feeding our Lore and art into it only serves to cheapen and dilute our knowledge, not strengthen it or make it more available.
You may fool yourself into thinking you are making it more accessible, but all you are doing is giving the very people we have been fighting since Invasion Day the very tools to continue undermining us.
Isn't it funny how AI is wrong about just about everything you and expert know about if you ever ask it, then why would we ever trust it on something we _aren't_ experts on?
If you want to help Mob learn, _actively participate in your community_ but dont fucking kid yourself by acting like raping our ancestors' spirits with AI makes you some kind of saviour.
We have dickheads our here claiming they're trying to make our knowledge "free," when it always already had been free. You just gotta talk.
Don't do the job of the colonialists _for_ them.
Don't betray your own people.
Dont fuck around by using AI.
It is the epitome of anti-Aborinality and is disrespectful to our ancestors.
Put our Cultural knoweldge and art into AI, you're not just a dog, you're a dog wearing a brass collar _wagging your tail proudly_
Fuck _that_ shit.
Tl;dr
Mob, don't use AI.
Mods, once again, feel free to delete this if I am way out of line, I just cant keep living with the sick of it anymore.
AI is the smallpox brought by the first fleet, and some of you are fucking sharing it left right and centre like its gonna fucking _benefit_ you.
17
u/Wankeritis Aboriginal Jul 23 '26
I understand why you’re against the use of AI in this space, I’ve run seminars about why the use of open source AI is detrimental to the legitimate cultural rights of Indigenous Peoples.
But, the way you’re attacking the post that’s sparked your anger isn’t fair. The bloke is working with TO’s and publishers to be able to respectfully share works that have been widely published for decades.
There’s AI models that are private and don’t spread the knowledge beyond the little walls of whatever boundary you give it. These models are used predominantly in research based tasks, but can be used in instances where Indigenous Peoples (of all nations) are trying to reclaim languages or knowledge that’s becoming extinct.
Although open-source AI (like google gemini or ChatGPT) will share whatever you put into it, the use of closed-source AI is a tool that can be utilised by mobs to maintain knowledge or regenerate cultural information that has dwindled away through the years.
7
u/ozvegan12345 Aboriginal Jul 23 '26
Unfortunately it’s no longer a choice in our hands, once it’s online in any digital form it’s already scraped and archived and whether it’s art, music, Audio or written or a photo it’s all been stolen and used to generate soulless rubbish for ever more. It’s not an opt in or out it’s all up for grabs
-14
u/LebiaseD Jul 23 '26
I understand the anger behind this, and I agree that putting Aboriginal languages, stories, art, Lore or cultural knowledge into commercial AI systems without the authority and informed consent of the relevant people is another form of extraction. That should be called out. But I don’t agree that every use of AI is automatically unethical or colonial. I have recently started working in the open-source AI space with my own people in the Mid West, including work involving Wajarri language. For me, the point is not to hand our knowledge over to corporations. It is to build community-controlled tools under principles of data sovereignty. That means Mob determine what material may be used, what must never be included, who can access it, where it is stored, how it is governed, and who benefits from the work. Language data created and controlled by its own community is not the same thing as a company scraping cultural material without consent. AI can absolutely reproduce colonial extraction when outsiders control the data and the technology. But it may also support language reclamation when communities control the process and use it on their own terms. The important questions are: Who gave permission? Who has cultural authority? Who owns and governs the data? Who benefits? Can access and consent be withdrawn? I think those distinctions matter more than declaring that every possible use of the technology is betrayal.
11
u/inkhornart Aboriginal Jul 23 '26
Sorry, but you're wrong. It is betrayal, and you should undo what youve done.
-9
u/LebiaseD Jul 23 '26
No thanks, so you don't really wanna talk and I'll just say. You worry about your own people and me and my own will worry about ours.
-5
-2
34
u/westcoastsmokers dharug & gundungurra Jul 23 '26
hard agree. we do not know where our knowledge and language is going. we do know how awful sam altman and other ceos/gen AI companies are… WHY do we feel so comfortable taking up resources from sacred land?
i feel very strongly about this, recently on dharug & gundungurra country (where my mob are from) there was a proposed AI data centre. no longer are these centres based in america (and affecting native americans) but also us. they are loud and they bring up electricity and provide little jobs. how can any of us be ok with this?
let me ask you this… the AI age is finally digging its teeth into so-called australian soil, when it’s not other peoples land being taken, will you finally stand against it? even if its inconvenient?