AIAI: Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity is a small-scale, experimental research project. With the collaboration of the Brazil-based NGO Thydêwá, it has brought together a group of Indigenous artists, writers, teachers and community leaders from across Abya Yala (specifically, what is today Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Chile) with non-Indigenous researchers and artist-technologists located in the UK and Ireland in order to critically evaluate the nature of generative AI tools for image generation in relation to Indigenous cultures and values. It started in 2023 with our first experiments with the tool MidJourney. We then moved on to design a bespoke image generation tool based on Stable Diffusion in early 2024. Preliminary results have been exhibited at The Convention House in Leeds, the Galería Gabriela Mistral in Santiago de Chile and the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin, and an open-access book drawing together project materials and findings, including chapters authored by the full range of project team members, is forthcoming with University of London Press (Autumn 2026).
While we knew in advance that GenAI tools would evidence unhelpful biases in their results, the point of the project was to allow those who were curious about the tools to experiment with them to see what could be achieved and to explore how the individual artists involved responded to the results. This has allowed us to think through the design process for a better kind of model, not only in terms of the results it produces but also in terms of questions of data security and environmental concerns relating to the extravagant amounts of energy required to train LLMs in the first place. This paper will report and reflect on the journey travelled thus far, including contexualisation in terms of AI art, Indigenous appropriations of AI and Latin American Indigenous art experimenting with AI, and exploration of key topics such as creativity, censorship and copyright, and appropriation, ancestrality and buen vivir.
It will be presented by two of the non-Indigenous researchers on the project, with permission from other project members, and supplemented by video recordings of some of the Indigenous artists and writers reflecting on their experiences.