Indigenous Appropriation of Artificial Intelligence (Sebastián Gerlic)

AIAI – Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity was a beautiful exploratory research project reflecting on AI image generation based on text prompts. Since, in this incarnation, I’m more excited about creation than research, and since I love creating and encouraging others to create and co-create, as soon as AIAI ended, I dreamt up the project AIIA – Apropriação Indígena da Inteligência Artificial [Indigenous Appropriation of Artificial Intelligence]. I dreamt of the opportunity to bring together several of my Indigenous friends and to collectively learn to use AI with a critical eye, embracing generative AI as a tool rather than as consumers used by it.¹ With the financial support of the Ibercultura Viva programme and continued support from the University of Leeds and from Thea Pitman, the AIIA project was an opportunity to continue our explorations with Midjourney and other AI image-generation tools and to take risks artistically.

After three months of weekly virtual meetings, of exchanges between twelve people – ten of them Indigenous (nine visual artists and one writer) and two non-Indigenous facilitators – bringing their voices together from four different countries (Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile), we decided that some of the images we had created should be compiled in some way. Since our network De Abya Yala Con Amor [From Abya Yala with Love] had already published two e-books, we decided to create a third: Imagine: La Pequeña Francisca en Abya Yala [Imagine: Little Francisca in Abya Yala] (Red Abya Yala con Amor 2023).

The vast majority of picture books start with the writing of the text, followed by the drawing of the illustrations. With Imagine, the images came first, and then Mariela Tulián, in co-creation with everyone else, stitched together a unique story where, in each chapter, the protagonist travels to the Indigenous community of each of the different illustrators in turn. Imagine is the result of an initial appropriation of generative AI; a process captured in an e-book available free to the public since late 2023. It aims to be a way of inspiring the globalised world with Indigenous visions.

Ancestral Intelligence (Sebastián Gerlic)

In 2023, we were hearing a lot about Artificial Intelligence from both ‘apocalyptic and integrated’ commentators, to use Umberto Eco’s (1994 [1964]) classic definition. During the coronavirus lockdown, our lives seemed to have become one long streaming loop – we dragged ourselves from livestream to livestream, more dead than alive, consuming so many screens with their dystopias on demand and on special offer. I wasn’t content with these ‘canned goods’ and wanted to amplify other voices and share other perspectives, such as the ones Ailton Krenak portrays in the book Futuro Ancestral (2019) / Ancestral Future (2022). So, I took up my communication tools and used artistic means to contribute to the project of ‘indigenising’ humanity. I’m currently finalising a documentary film called Inteligência Ancestral [Ancestral Intelligence] (Gerlic 2025a). In order to produce it, I conducted seven interviews, five of which were with Indigenous people who had participated in the AIAI and/or AIIA projects. Using funding from Bahia state’s Paulo Gustavo Law to support cultural initiatives after the COVID-19 pandemic, we released the video at the end of August 2025. Along the way, I also edited seven mini-documentaries about each of the interviewees (Gerlic 2025b).

In my view, humanity is undertaking the third ‘Great Turning’, in the terms of Joanna Macy and others (Korten 2006; Macy 2009), or, as many Indigenous prophecies have foretold, we are experiencing an enormous, deep and radical transformation. As capitalism dies and the ‘rot’ hidden by the system is revealed, we are building a new Earth. This new Earth will need to revive many of the old ways of being that were obliterated, and it is through the living wisdom of the people who conserve the oldest traditions – for example, the Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala – that we can reconnect as children of Mother Earth, abandoning the suicidal role of exploiters. If we reconnect with the beating heart of the Earth, we can reconnect with each other, and together we can form the ‘Web of Life’. In this sense, it is worth revisiting the strong relationship between Pachamamism² and James Lovelock’s Gaia Theory (2000 [1979]). And you could also take this further, following Carl Sagan and the wisdom of ancestral cosmologies that argue that ‘we are made of star-stuff’ (Sagan 2000 [1973], 190). I believe that we are all experiencing a great shift together, and that ‘ancestral intelligence’– a collective wisdom that has grown trans-generationally, from remix to remix, for thousands of years, that is in our DNA, in social memory, in nature and in the stars – is fundamental to making this ‘Great Turning’. Essentially, it’s about understanding the signals of the Web of Life that unite everything and all of us, a theme I explore in depth in the documentary. I also believe that, by appropriating Artificial Intelligence, we can bring many different forms of intelligence together and make the shift, for society as a whole, towards Suma Qamana or Sumak Kawsay, an Indigenous (Aymara/Kichwa) concept frequently translated as ‘buen vivir/bem viver’ or ‘vivir bien/viver bem’ in Spanish and Portuguese, respectively. In English it translates as ‘good living’ or ‘living well’ and is a holistic concept that goes beyond individual ‘wellbeing’ to encompass living well as a community and in harmony with the natural environment. And to achieve this, I’d bet that the ancestral intelligence that lives within all of us will play a leading role.³

Digital Buen Vivir (Alex Potiguara)

Like Sebastián, I’m also interested in the concept of Buen Vivir. Although, in its current iteration, some argue that its original Indigenous roots have been usurped as it has been rearticulated as a mainstream political concept (Altmann 2017), it is still a useful lens through which to examine the extent to which things such as new technologies are suited to Indigenous Peoples, their needs and worldviews, and indeed to wider planetary thriving. Initially, with money from the ESRC-funded Digital Good Network, Thea led a project in early 2024 called ‘INDIGENIA: Generative AI for Indigenous Futures and “Digital Good Living”’ that aimed to explore digital inclusion and the appropriation of digital resources by the Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala, focusing on what the ‘digital good’ might mean from an Indigenous perspective. While the project originally intended to focus on the impact of generative AI tools, for pragmatic reasons related to the availability of equipment and bandwidth at the field site (the premises of the Associação Indigenista de Maringá [the Indigenist Association of Maringá], in Paraná state, Brazil), the project focused more on the philosophical aspects of the question and led to the drafting of a ‘Manifesto for Digital Buen Vivir’, which aimed to envision what a good digital society would look like based on the worldviews of diverse Indigenous Peoples, as articulated by those present at the workshop (Potiguara et al. 2024).

I was a member of the team working on the INDIGENIA project and am a co-author of the manifesto. I was also invited to participate in the AIAI project for the workshop in Leeds in March 2024 where the image-generation prototype was designed. As an Indigenous early-career researcher with specific expertise in the Indigenous appropriation of digital technologies (cf. Mesquita 2022), in 2025, I was awarded a Digital Good Network visiting fellowship to work with Professor Helen Kennedy at the University of Sheffield to build on the manifesto and try to transform it into a concrete set of actions.

The project was called ‘Indigenous Peoples and Digital Good Living’, and it employed the Dragon Dreaming methodology inspired by Australian Aboriginal decision-making practices (outlined in Chapter 15) to conduct a series of six ‘digital campfires’ (online meetings) where participants discussed Buen Vivir, its relationship to all things digital and evaluated the 2024 manifesto, followed by a five-day in-person workshop at the Tabaçu village of the Tupi-Guarani people in São Paulo state. This workshop integrated ancestral rituals and spiritual practices, updated the manifesto and produced an action plan with twenty-eight proposed initiatives, five of which were then prioritised for immediate implementation.

The key achievement of the project has been the creation of an Indigenous-led network advocating for both physical and digital Buen Vivir, with a focus on promoting Indigenous agency rather than on lobbying external actors to take action. With respect to the digital in particular, this research underscores the urgency of defending Indigenous digital rights and demonstrates how Indigenous communities can creatively adapt digital technologies to uphold cultural integrity and autonomy. As such, the concept of Digital Buen Vivir has a decolonial dimension, using tools from a colonising system and repurposing them as instruments of resistance. Overall, while many of the aspects of Digital Buen Vivir outlined in the manifesto (such as influencing the design of mainstream hardware and software) remain out of reach, we have found that its elaboration and socialisation in Indigenous circles have played an important role, serving as a compass to guide us towards future action and as a means of dreaming the future that we want. The role of the AIAI project and its use of AI-generated art to provoke those thoughts and dreams of future possibilities for effecting social change was a crucial and innovative first step.

Notes

1. Editors’ note: As a result of his experience of the AIAI project, Alex Potiguara has chosen to identify this approach as ‘(co)criação artificial indígena’ [Indigenous artificial co-creation] (Potiguara 2024). It also sits well with Lev Manovich and Emanuele Arielli’s (2024) definition of ‘extended aesthetics’ as discussed in Chapter 1.

2. Editors’ note: In Andean cosmology, Pachamama means ‘mother spacetime’ or ‘mother cosmos’, although it is most frequently translated into English as ‘Mother Earth’ (Vallejo and Morena Soto 2018). Pachamamismo is the ethos of respect for the planet.

3. Editors’ note: The use of the term ‘Ancestral Intelligence’ is becoming ever more prevalent across Abya Yala/Latin America as an Indigenous and more broadly Latin American decolonial riposte to the rise of Artificial Intelligence. For example, in 2023, it was the title of an exhibition of work by Argentinian artist Marcelo Toledo at the Argentine Embassy in New York (Efe 2023), and it is also the subject of a recently published book by Brazilian journalist, Petria Chaves: Como sei o que sei: o desenvolvimento da intuição como trilha para nossa inteligência ancestral (IA) [How I Know What I Know: Developing Intuition as a Path to Our Ancestral Intelligence (AI)] (2025). As noted in Chapter 2, it has also recently been used by the Brazilian researcher of alternative conceptualisations of AI, Gustavo Nogueira de Menezes (2025).