“Stop Generating”: Generative AI in the Contexts of Indigenous Studies

Generative AI has forced universities to contend with complex ethical and social questions—namely because writing is so deeply entrenched as an institutional gatekeeping. For many students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds or for whom English is not a first language, the pressure to translate ideas into “proper” English contributes to attrition rates and exacerbates feelings of inadequacy, alienation, and exclusion from many academic communities.

In this presentation, I draw from Indigenous theorists and authors to situate generative AI and large language models (LLMs) within a long colonial history of extraction. Just as colonial states declare Indigenous lands terra nullius, allowing settlers to exploit resources through mining, clear-cutting, and other forms of extraction, generative AI similarly depends on the unchecked extraction of data, including Indigenous knowledge and cultural resources, often without consent. The late Gregory Younging refers to this process as gnaritas nullius, the colonial rendering of Indigenous knowledge into public property. The unchecked extraction of writing, including, but not limited to, Indigenous knowledge, represents a new frontier for colonial capitalism, where cultural and intellectual property are commodified by those with the most access and power. The goal is not to discourage the use of generative AI but, in the Faustian sense, to reveal the costs of embracing it, especially when it is employed to subvert oppressive institutional structures.

Speaker

David Gaertner, Associate Professor, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies