The built-in censorship and political bias of China-made generative AI, DeepSeek, in spreading a pro-China narrative has been widely reported. At the same time, Western generative AIs are also handy for spreading propaganda across the internet. As revealed by OpenAI’s transparency reports , Russian and Chinese information operators have used ChatGPT to analyze public opinion and tailor content to their target audiences. Recently, amid the U.S.–Israel war on Iran, war propaganda, in the form of AI-generated deepfake videos , has also flooded major social media platforms. A minority of disinformation operators can now manipulate the majority’s perception of reality thanks to their AI assistants. The need to rebalance power China also has a vital lesson for the world on AI governance. Since 2022, it has rolled out a series of laws and regulations, including the Algorithmic Recommendation Provisions (2022), Deep Synthesis Management Provisions (2023), Generative AI Interim Measures (2023), and AI Labeling Measures (2025), to prevent the illegal and malicious use of AI and to ensure that machine-generated content aligns with China’s socialist core values.


User rights regarding personal data protection, consent, and access have been fairly addressed, with additional requirements for corporate responsibility to enhance algorithmic transparency and non-discriminatory, non-addictive measures. Yet, as the aim of the laws is to protect national security, public order, and political ideology, there is no restriction on state power. On Chinese social media, it is not uncommon to see users complaining that they had the police knocking at their doors simply because they bought something suspicious, such as a drone for taking photos. The social credit system, together with online censorship, a grid management system and other social control system, tracks users’ online activity records, including financial transactions, social connections, and speech, and restricts their access to digital and public services, such as online payment systems and travel purchases , when their credit scores are low and subsequently listed on the Chinese courts’ “judgement of dishonest persons list”. The duties imposed by the laws on the corporate sector seem sound and fair.


Yet, there are very few independent civil society organizations to monitor the private sector and ensure that technology companies have indeed implemented the protective measures required by law. As a result, security breaches and personal data leaks due to poorly designed AI products, such as the DJI Romo Vacuum, have persisted in recent years. In 2025, a major data breach exposed the records of billions of Chinese users , including names, ID numbers, passwords, and financial and banking details linked to their social media accounts. These records could be exploited by scammers to plot against the individuals involved. Despite all the security risks, mainland Chinese citizens have been quick to embrace emerging technology, particularly AI. The latest example, which took place in early March across major Chinese cities, is the rush to install OpenClaw , an AI bot coded by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger that integrates with other LLMs such as DeepSeek and Claude, runs on a local computer, and stores data locally. Jumping on the trend, other Chinese firms, including Tencent, ByteDance, and Xiaomi, rolled out similar products.


Such tech fanaticism, driven by both the Chinese government’s policy to integrate advanced technology into the economy and people’s anxiety about being left behind amid rapid tech innovation, turns people into fans and followers of a Leviathan, to which people feed their time, energy, desires, ideas, and data with no idea about who controls it and where it might lead them. Even though transparency and consumer rights protection have been written into Chinese AI laws, the human rights protection remains flat, as people are unaware of their rights and the potential harms that come with the abusive and malicious use of the technology. Instead, most mainland Chinese citizens, in the absence of choice, have accepted surveillance technology, such as the omnipresence of facial-recognition security cameras, as a normal and convenient feature of public life. The mechanism for change is blocked. We can see in the Chinese AI dystopia that people are not in control of the technology, but they are subjected to a regime that sees technology as a means to expand and consolidate the state’s political and economic power.


It shows us that the core of the human rights approach to AI should aim at rebalancing the power among the corporate-state, the machine, and the people through a decision-making framework that places people back at the center, and unwinding tech fanaticism through human-oriented research and public deliberation, reflective cultural practices, and humanity education. Oiwan Lam is a regional editor at Global Voices covering news about East Asia. Ibrahim Kizza is a visual artist, designer, and illustrator whose work explores human connection, identity, and culture. His illustrations are defined by bold compositions, expressive colour, and a strong narrative focus, often centring Black life and lived experience. Working across editorial and digital spaces, he creates art and illustrations that balance simplicity with emotional depth, using contrast and symbolism to communicate complex ideas with clarity. For this project, Ibrahim develops a visual response to the tension between artificial and human connection, reinforcing the value of lived experience and collective creativity in an increasingly automated world. Beyond illustration, his interests span design, sport, and film, which continue to inform his visual language and storytelling.


Bosnian rock band Dubioza Kolektiv satirizes blind trust in artificial intelligence

The Bosnian band Dubioza Kolektiv has released a new song named “Yebiga,” (a common expletive similar to “Screw that,” translated as “What the hell” in the subtitles). The song offers a sharp and funny critique of society’s growing dependence on artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic decision-making, enabling a technocracy — (in the sense of rule by tech billionaire oligarchs) — instead of democracy. Known for blending humor, political commentary and catchy rhythms, this internationally popular band continues its tradition of addressing contemporary issues through satire. In the past, they have confronted media overload , democratic backsliding , migration to the US , online music piracy , Balkan stereotypes , the reality TV industry , the Flat Earth conspiracy theory , and more. This time, they are focusing on the embrace of technology and the erosion of independent thinking.


They published the video of the song in Bosnian, with English and Spanish subtitles: The opening describes the rise of a digital brotherhood in which Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos symbolize the arrival of technocracy, setting the tone for a critique of systems increasingly governed by algorithms. In the chorus, the band ironically celebrates a world where AI replaces books and thinking altogether: A.I. baš nas briga ne treba nam više knjiga AI, svi smo isti ne moramo više mislit’ AI, we don’t care go and throw the books away (we don’t need books anymore) AI, we’re the same we don’t need to use our brains (we don’t need to think anymore) Through repetition and deliberately simplistic phrasing, the lyrics mimic the very mindset they criticize — one that prioritizes convenience over critical engagement. The song’s central refrain, “AI is the boss now; there’s no going back…what the hell!” captures a sense of resignation toward technological dominance, while the use of humor and colloquial language underscores the absurdity of surrendering human agency to machines.


In another verse, the band contrasts physical labor with automated thinking, suggesting a world where humans perform routine tasks while machines make decisions: Čovjek fizikaneri, nek’ razmišlja mašina Ako mene pitaš ‘vako mi je draže Radim tačno ‘nako kako “kompijuter” kaže Humans do the labor, we will let machines think. If you ask me, I prefer it much better this way — I just do whatever mighty computer says This portrayal reflects broader concerns about algorithmic authority, echoing debates about automation, digital platforms, and the societal impact of artificial intelligence. Reviving Yugoslav comedy gold The music video, directed by Vedran Mujagić, reinforces these themes through a playful yet unsettling visual narrative, featuring exaggerated characters and scenes that highlight conformity and passive acceptance of technological control. The video features the funny character Đipalo Junuz, played by Zenit Đozić , and the fictional invention HEPEK — a device composed of a log and electronic circuits.


Both were introduced in the legendary sketch comedy show “ Top Lista Nadrealista ” (“ The Surrealists’ Top Chart” ) or TLN for short, produced by TV Sarajevo between 1984 and 1991, and widely regarded as one of the most influential satirical shows in Yugoslav pop culture. Part of the subcultural “New Primitivism” art movement, TLN was like a local version of “ Monty Python's Flying Circus .” Many of its sketches, including HEPEK, became cultural memes decades before the internet. During the tensions that led to Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, HEPEK was satirically presented as a device that helped resolve conflicts — everything from kindergarten disagreements and disputes between neighbors over a cow’s grazing ground, to frustrations with bureaucracy and inter-ethnic tensions in parliament : In the first such sketch from 1990 , using pseudo-technical and exaggerated bureaucratic language, the character Đipalo Junuz explains that HEPEK is an invention developed in the supposed new technology center of Čeljigovići, which in reality was — and still is — a small rural village in the Bosnian mountains near Sarajevo.


He claims that the villagers had invented “the splitting of atoms, artificial insemination and the Hrkljuš ,” a fictional sport that also became a meme . Other sketches present the villagers as “economically and educationally” challenged: they use non-elite language, dress in old clothes, and live in modest homes. In the words of Đipalo Junuz: HEPEK, to ti je ko ono, kod situacija kada si čoek ono nešto na živčanom sistemu, ono nekako pobudali, kada se natakari na tebe, ti na njega djeluješ hepekom i situacija za čas se smiri. Znači kada se on natakari na tebe, ti ga hepekiraš i situacija se smiri. HEPEK, it's like that, in situations where you have done something to a person’s nervous system, you have somehow aroused it to become crazy, when he attacks you, you act on him with HEPEK and the situation calms down in an instant. So when he turns on you, you HEPEK him and the situation calms down. In the new Dubioza Kolektiv video, different situations and dilemmas involving the use of AI are solved by applying the upgraded version of HEPEK; the song ends with the signature “HEPEK sound.”


This approach of reintroducing cult TV comedy elements resonated with the band’s audience: the YouTube version got over one and a half million views in a month, which is a lot for a song from the Western Balkans. Dubioza Kolektiv has built a reputation across the region and beyond for tackling political and social issues — from nationalism and corruption to conspiracy theories and media manipulation. Their previous work has often intersected with disinformation themes, using satire to expose flawed logic and manipulative narratives. With “Yebiga,” the band shifts its focus to a different but related domain: the risks of outsourcing critical thinking to opaque technological systems. In a region where media literacy and information integrity remain key challenges, such cultural interventions play an important role in encouraging audiences to reflect on their relationship with technology. By framing complex issues through humor and accessible language, Dubioza Kolektiv once again demonstrates how popular culture can contribute to public awareness — this time by asking a simple but urgent question: “What happens when we stop thinking for ourselves?”


Friends no more: How Kyrgyzstan’s ruling tandem crumbled overnight

In February 2026, Kyrgyzstan’s ruling tandem, consisting of the president Sadyr Japarov and the former Chief of the State Committee of National Security (UKMK) Kamchybek Tashiyev, crumbled in several days and came to an abrupt end. This marked the end of a political era that began in October 2020, when Japarov and Tashiyev came to power following violent protests over rigged parliamentary elections, agreeing to informally share power and spheres of influence. The president emerged victorious in what appears to have been a hidden power struggle ahead of the presidential elections in 2027, whereas Tashiyev was dismissed from his powerful post, and his entourage was purged from the state structures. These events marked the end of the decades-long political alliance and declared friendship. The most important implication of them parting ways is for the future, as questions linger about what Kyrgyzstan will be like without the heavy-handed former security chief who had a hand in almost everything taking place in the country.


A scandalous letter What seems to have set the falling-out in motion was the letter signed by a group of 75 public activists, former top-level government officials, and scientists to Japarov, in which they asked the president to hold the presidential elections in 2026 instead of 2027. It came out on February 9, 2026, and noted that Japarov was elected in 2021 under the old constitution, which set the presidential term at five years. In contrast, the new constitution, adopted after Japarov’s election, set this term at six years, creating a legal conundrum, according to the letter’s authors. The only solution, they argued, was to hold the presidential elections in 2026 and end legal debates. In addition, the letter offered an assessment of Japarov’s five years of presidency, highlighting his achievements and shortcomings, and adding that “the first stage of the activities of the current top leadership of Kyrgyzstan has been logically completed.” Interpreting the letter as pressure, Japarov removed Tashiyev from his post as the UKMK chief on February 10, 2026, suggesting he viewed his former ally as the mastermind behind the letter.


Indeed, in Kyrgyzstan’s political context, where power was monopolized by these two figures, it is unlikely that anyone other than Tashiyev would dare make such a move. Read more: Kyrgyzstan’s security chief is on a mission to solve every problem in the country After returning from Germany to Kyrgyzstan, where he was undergoing medical treatment at the time of his dismissal, Tashiyev became utterly powerless, removed from all the government posts he held. Commenting on Tashiyev’s dismissal, Japarov revealed that he had met with the former police chief and told him : “Rest, friend, take care of your health, be calm.” Later, he urged people not to turn the whole thing into a drama and stated: Nothing will happen [after Tashiyev’s removal]. There’s no need to turn this issue into a tragedy. It will be even better than before. Life won’t stop. If one friend leaves, I have more than 7 million friends behind me. Our people and our blessed state are most precious to me.


Falling dominoes Since Tashiyev’s removal, a long list of top-level government officials and parliament members have stepped down, been dismissed, or been arrested, exposing the significant influence he held over the political life. Like dominoes, the members of his loyalist network came falling down, one after another. First, all his deputies and heads of the two biggest regional UKMK departments, Bishkek (capital) and Osh, were removed, clearing space for new leadership. The newly minted UKMK chief, Zhumgalbek Shabdanbekov, announced his department would conduct an internal investigation , which resulted in seven employees being dismissed, 83 being relieved of their positions, and six being removed from the list of potential political candidates . He vowed to depoliticize UKMK’s work and noted the committee “is not a personal body created for a specific individual,” taking a jab at his predecessor. In addition, UKMK was weakened through restructuring that removed control over state borders and the security of top-level state officials. As a result, two new government bodies were formed : the State Border Service and the State Security Service under the President’s Office.


The so-called “ cadre cleansing ” at UKMK was just the beginning. What followed were numerous dismissals and appointments of new officials. The affected state bodies included the Interior Ministry, Prosecutor General’s Office, Ministry of Transport and Communication, Ministry of Natural Resources, Ministry of Emergency, Health Ministry, Water and Industry Ministry, Justice Ministry, and Ministry of Education. Additionally, Japarov appointed new mayors in four major cities, including the second-largest city of Osh, where Tashiyev’s close ally and friend, Jenishbek Toktorbayev, was removed from his post. The parliament was not immune to purges either. By mid-March, eight parliament members, affiliated with Tashiyev, gave up their mandates , including the speaker, Nurlanbek Turgunbek uulu, and Tashiyev’s brother, Shayirbek Tashiyev, who was eventually arrested and placed under temporary detention . Tashiyev has remained completely silent throughout these purges, appearing in public only twice, first at the Eid prayer and then at the election of the new president of Kyrgyzstan’s Football Union , where Tashiyev relinquished another role. Unclear future Tashiyev’s own future remains unclear but looks somewhat grim. There are hints that he may face prosecution for his alleged transgressions and abuse of power.


Following his departure from UKMK, the State Tax Service released an investigation , claiming Tashiyev’s relatives and close associates built corruption schemes and benefited from the sale of state oil. The estimated damage to the state is USD 45.7 million. The ongoing criminal investigation has already placed his brother, former deputy Shayirbek, under detention on corruption charges. Here is a YouTube video explaining the investigation. The irony is that Tashiyev became famous for his anti-corruption campaign, called “kusturizatsiya,” a term derived from the Kyrgyz word “kusturuu” (to purge). Politicians and businessmen charged with corruption were forced to compensate for the damages caused to the state. UKMK decided on the amount and released offenders in an extrajudicial process without the involvement of courts. Read more: Kusturizatsiya: One word that explains Kyrgyzstan’s fight against economic crimes According to Sharshenbek Abdykerimov, a fugitive businessman who was subjected to kusturizatsiya, the process was fully arbitrary. He revealed that the deal with the state was for him to compensate USD 20 million in property. However, Tashiyev allegedly changed his mind and demanded USD 30 million in cash instead.


Additionally, Abdykermov claimed one of his expropriated properties was assessed below market price and transferred to individuals associated with Tashiyev’s wife. Abdykerimov is not alone in his allegations. Within two weeks of Tashiyev’s dismissal, around 500 complaints were filed against UKMK employees from businessmen and state officials, suggesting widespread abuse of power during Tashiyev’s reign. With his entourage purged from the state and law-enforcement bodies, Tashiyev remains politically paralyzed, forcing him to accept whatever ultimatum and/or offer the president puts forward, at least for now. Reconciliation with Japarov is not off the table, but it seems unlikely at this point. Their falling-out serves as a reminder of the political instability that has plagued Kyrgyzstan since 1991, when it gained independence from the Soviet Union. Since then, Kyrgyzstan has witnessed three revolutions : in 2005, 2010, and 2020. Should they manage to settle their differences peacefully, Japarov will be set to consolidate his rule even further and approach presidential elections in 2027 with full confidence. Kyrgyzstan’s tumultuous political history warns against making forecasts and suggests waiting and seeing.


Australia’s Budj Bim features one of the world’s oldest aquaculture systems

Australia has one of the world’s oldest aquaculture sites, a controlled aquatic farming environment, where eels were farmed by Indigenous people for thousands of years. Scientists estimate one of the five systems is around 6,600 years old, based on carbon-dating findings. The Budj Bim eel farms’ cultural landscape in western Victoria was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2019. Budj Bim is a dormant volcano with ancient basalt lava flows. It was the first site inscribed on the UNESCO list for its cultural significance alone. This video was produced by the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation at the time of its nomination: The Gunditjmara are the traditional Indigenous owners of the land. They resisted white colonization and dispossession in the hard-fought frontier Eumerella Wars from the 1830s to the 1860s. Many lived on a Church of England mission near Lake Condah from the 1890s till the 1950s. This hand-drawn map of the Lake Condah area and fish trap systems was produced by Alexander Ingram in 1893: TikTok user, westvicbrolga, recently posted a video of a Budj Bim tour led by Gunditjmara man, Joey Saunders: Local Winda-Mara Aboriginal Corporation conducts guided tours of the eel traps and stone houses.


The Tae Rak Aquaculture center at Lake Condah has many stone holding tanks for eels, and visitors can have an eel tasting in their bush tucker cafe. The discovery of the traps has helped to correct misconceptions about pre-colonial Indigenous peoples as being only nomadic hunter-gatherers. Ian J. McNiven, Professor of Indigenous Archaeology at Monash University explained the new findings in an article in The Conversation: Rather than living passively off whatever nature provided, the Gunditjmara actively and deliberately manipulated local water flows and ecologies to engineer a landscape focused on increasing the availability and reliability of eels. Manipulation of the landscape involved stone structures (such as traps and channels) dating back at least 6,600 years. Eel aquaculture facilities (ponds and dam walls) pre-date contact with Europeans by many hundreds (and possibly thousands) of years. The remains of approximately 300 stone-walled structures, which may have been houses, have also been found near the eel traps. They could provide evidence of permanent occupation before European contact. One of the world’s oldest creation stories also stems from Budj Bim, explaining the origins of the iconic volcano:


From blooms to bytes: Will Kenya’s data center boom repeat the ‘Greenhouse Effect’?

Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, Kenya experienced a massive influx of polythene greenhouse technology led by multinationals such as DCK, Oserian, and Aquila Farm . Naivasha became the epicenter of this floral revolution because of its unique geographic advantages and proximity to Lake Naivasha , which provided the fresh water needed for large-scale greenhouse irrigation. This polythene greenhouse technology allowed farmers to control humidity and temperature , making it possible to grow high-quality roses, which have become Kenya’s primary floral export, thereby making Naivasha the “rose capital” of the world. Workers’ rights violations While polythene greenhouse technology by multinationals promised economic salvation and provided thousands of jobs, it simultaneously ignited long-standing disputes and faced persistent allegations of workers’ rights violations, health concerns, environmental concerns, and tax evasion and avoidance. These long-standing disputes led to increased pressure from international fair-trade bodies and local activists to enforce stricter compliance and ensure that Kenya’s “flower basket” benefits the local economy, workers, and the environment as much as it does the exporters.


Today, the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is triggering a global “scramble” for infrastructure, mirroring the expansion of polythene greenhouse corporations. Tech giants like Google , Meta , and Microsoft are intensifying data center construction across countries in the Global Majority , attracted by abundant land, cheap resources, and lax regulatory environments that often disregard the core tenets of local rights and justice. History is repeating itself in Naivasha , Kenya, with a new industrial wave of data center construction sweeping through the same region as tech giants like Microsoft and G42 are embarking on a USD 1 billion “green” data center project in Olkaria, Naivasha. This new wave of industrial construction in Naivasha, marketed as the “backbone of the digital economy,” mirrors the earlier floral boom. They are also offering familiar pledges of job creation and technological growth, but evading scrutiny regarding land rights, environmental rights, digital rights and sovereignty, tax justice, labor, and human rights.


Social actors in the Global Minority are already sounding the alarm on how data centers “guzzle” water and violate communities’ labor rights . Are data centers a boon for Kenya’s economy, or are they going to abuse Kenyan citizens’ rights? The construction of data center infrastructure in Kenya is a double-edged sword. While these data storage facilities are often marketed as the “backbone of the digital economy,” their physical presence introduces significant risks related to land rights, water exploitation, labor abuses and violation, tax evasions and avoidance and the deepening of existing inequalities. Also, the rapid construction of data centers might entrench a new form of digital colonialism just as the cut-flower industry sparked debates over land rights, labor conditions, environmental sustainability and tax justice in Kenya. The parallel between the polythene greenhouses of the 1980s and the high-tech server farms of today suggests that without rigorous oversight, the promise of a digital future may come at the same heavy cost to human rights and environmental justice as the floral exports that preceded it.


The construction of Microsoft and G42 ’s data center has raised several questions in the minds of many Kenyan activists and citizens: Will Microsoft and G42 pay land rates and rents at the same scale as ordinary Kenyans for the Olkaria site, or will they be granted exemptions? Who will carry the burden of the massive water and electricity consumption required for these facilities ? Will the burden fall on the Kenyan taxpayer or the corporations themselves? Will the local economy be bypassed through “tax holidays” and profit-shifting maneuvers that drain the local economy? How will the storage of sensitive national data be protected when the infrastructure is controlled by foreign entities like the US and UAE ? While Microsoft is registered in the US, specifically incorporated in the state of Washington, with its global headquarters in Redmond, Washington, G42 is a prominent artificial intelligence and cloud computing holding company registered and headquartered in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE). G42 has a massive strategic partnership with Microsoft, which recently invested USD1.5 billion in the company.


In the context of the Kenya project, G42 often acts as the regional infrastructure lead, while Microsoft provides the software and cloud platform (Azure). The Microsoft and G42 data center in Olkaria, Naivasha, is being built on land owned by the Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen). The project is located within the KenGen Green Energy Park , a 342-hectare (845-acre) industrial zone situated at the Olkaria geothermal fields. This park was established by KenGen to allow industrial investors to set up facilities near the source of geothermal power for a direct and sustainable energy supply. By building on KenGen’s land, the data center can be powered entirely by renewable geothermal energy produced on-site. While the land is KenGen’s, the facility itself is a collaborative investment between Microsoft and G42, in partnership with the Kenyan Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy. Will Microsoft and G42 pay land rates and rents at the same scale as ordinary Kenyans for the Olkaria site after acquiring land for free?


Impact on Kenya’s revenue-generating systems Kenya and the UAE are signatories to a Double Taxation Agreement (DTA), a bilateral treaty designed to foster trade by ensuring companies are not taxed twice on the same income. Traditionally, these “tax peace treaties” allocate taxing rights between the country where the income is generated (the source state) and the country where the company is headquartered (the residence state). The Kenya-UAE DTA was signed in 2011. While Kenya maintains a standard corporate tax rate of 30 percent , the UAE is a significantly lower-tax jurisdiction, with rates historically ranging from 0 percent to 9 percent (following their 2023 corporate tax reforms). This disparity creates a significant fiscal challenge. Under the treaty, a firm like G42, which serves as a regional infrastructure lead and is headquartered in the UAE, can utilize the DTA to minimize its Kenyan tax exposure. Specifically, profits generated from Kenyan operations can be moved to the UAE through payments for services, royalties, or interest, a practice known as profit shifting.


The DTA often lowers the withholding tax rates on these outward payments, effectively “shifting” the tax base from Kenya’s 30 percent environment to the UAE’s lower-tax regime, reducing withholding tax. This mechanism leaves the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) with a diminished tax base, as the primary taxing rights for a UAE-resident company often lean toward its home jurisdiction rather than where the physical infrastructure is located. The Kenyan power sector operates like a relay race, where electricity is “passed” from production to the final consumer through three distinct stages: generation, transmission, and distribution. KenGen handles the generation phase, creating power that is then transported across the country via the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company Limited ( KETRACO ’s) high-voltage transmission lines. Finally, Kenya Power acts as the sole distributor, purchasing this energy to retail it directly to the public. As G42 and Microsoft construct their power-hungry data centers within the KenGen Green Energy Park, they will likely bypass the Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) to source electricity directly from the producer.


While this direct-supply model offers efficiency for the investors, it raises a critical question: will Kenya as a whole benefit or lose when such large-scale projects do not contribute to the national distributor’s revenue? Kenya Power (KPLC) relies on large industrial customers to “subsidize” the cost of providing cheap electricity to rural and residential homes. When the biggest consumers (like data centers) bypass KPLC, the utility loses its most profitable customers. If KPLC loses its high-paying industrial revenue, it may be forced to increase tariffs for ordinary Kenyans to cover its fixed operational costs. A cost burden to ordinary Kenyan citizens. Direct deals mean that the money goes straight to KenGen. While this helps KenGen expand, it doesn't necessarily help KETRACO or KPLC modernize the aging “middle-track” grid that serves the rest of the country, leading to grid stagnation. Hidden cost to the Kenyan taxpayer Like many multinational corporations operating in Kenya, it is highly probable that the G42 and Microsoft data centers in Olkaria will utilize structured labor models, such as independent contracting, third-party outsourcing, and Professional Employer Organizations (PEOs), to manage their human resources.


If G42 and Microsoft adopt these models, the Kenyan government risks losing out on traditional “paycheck tax” revenue that is vital to the national budget. Specifically, if thousands of workers are categorized as contractors rather than employees, the state misses out on direct contributions to the Social Health Insurance Fund (SHIF), as well as the 1.5 percent affordable housing levy and tiered National Social Security Fund(NSSF) contributions, both of which require employer matching. These outsourced models shift the entire statutory burden to the worker, often resulting in lower compliance and smaller total contributions to the state. This creates a “Double Bypass” effect: when direct power supply (bypassing Kenya Power’s revenue) is combined with outsourced labor (bypassing the PAYE and levy pools), the project risks becoming an economic “enclave” that operates within Kenya’s borders without fully nourishing the local ecosystem. The paradox of ‘green energy’ While the G42/Microsoft project is celebrated for its use of “green” geothermal energy, it faces a significant challenge of aquifer depletion. Large-scale data centers act as “giant radiators,” requiring massive amounts of fresh water for their cooling systems.


To prevent thousands of servers from overheating, these facilities typically rely on evaporative cooling, a process that “consumes” water by converting it into steam. In the semi-arid region of Olkaria and the nearby Lake Naivasha basin, water is a finite and precious resource. If the project relies on this basin, it will create an immediate resource conflict, competing with local small-scale farmers and Kenya’s multi-billion-shilling flower industry. Furthermore, the project will risk being labeled as “green washing” if its water consumption exceeds the basin’s natural replenishment rate. Even the use of boreholes poses a threat; excessive extraction can lower the water table, drying up local wells and reducing the water available for domestic use and livestock. Data centers don’t just “consume” water; they often degrade it. Even when water isn’t evaporated, the “blowdown” water (the leftover mineral-heavy water) sometimes requires careful treatment before being returned to the environment to avoid thermal pollution or chemical runoff. The paradox of “green energy” is that geothermal power is carbon-neutral, but the cooling requirements for AI infrastructure can be ecologically expensive.


A lack of electricity and internet access hinders AI adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa

In the global artificial intelligence (AI) race, a fundamental reality affects much of Sub-Saharan Africa. Electricity cuts off several times a day, affecting computer power supplies, and internet connections cost over a quarter of a month’s salary, affecting access to online AI models. Although the emergence of AI has shaken up established industries and catapulted the world into a new technological era, this revolution is two-fold. The transformation it’s meant to bring to the world is more evident in the Global North than the Global South. Every day, leading tech companies announce the launch of new, increasingly powerful models, while Western governments debate complex regulations. In mainstream narratives, the world that AI seeks to transform also remains disproportionately Western. Africa struggles to keep up and embrace this revolution. The continent has a population of over 1.5 billion, more than half of whom live in rural areas that often lack electricity. AI adoption, therefore, encounters two structural obstacles before any algorithmic or data issue: electricity and internet access. Electricity: An invisible and hindering prerequisite In the 21st century, some people still live without electricity.


According to the International Energy Agency data , in 2025, almost 600 million Africans lacked access to electricity . Although this figure accounts for 43 percent of the African population, 85 percent of these people are in Sub-Saharan Africa. This disparity shows that, despite ongoing efforts, electricity coverage remains incommensurate with demographic growth, which exceeds the rate of electrification. Unequal access to electricity makes these disparities even more evident. While countries like South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya have higher rates of electrification, other countries like Niger, Chad, and South Sudan have very low rates. In these countries, more than 80 percent of the population lives in areas without reliable access to electricity. Even in countries with more advanced electricity supplies, the quality remains uncertain. Power outages in South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire are daily realities that affect businesses, hospitals, and households alike. Interviewed during the World Governments Summit in Dubai, in February 2026, Walid Sheta, president of Schneider Electric Middle East and Africa, explained the matter to Africanews : Le vrai défi est de coordonner gouvernements, entreprises et partenaires financiers pour électrifier chaque territoire avec une solution adaptée.


The real challenge is bringing together governments, companies, and financial partners to electrify each region with tailored solutions. The fact that Africa doesn’t benefit from the wide range of solutions AI offers to many of the continent’s challenges is a major problem. A profound irony lies in the paradox that countries that would gain the most from AI are often those with the least means of accessing it. Various AI tools and platforms specializing in agriculture, medicine, finance, tech, and more require continuously operating smart devices, servers accessible 24/7, and stable networks. These prerequisites are lacking in many regions. Despite these fundamental shortcomings, and while a large proportion of the population experiences daily power outages, African governments and leading tech companies continue to announce national AI strategies, innovation hubs, and partnerships with Google and Microsoft. Folli Herbert Amouzougan, IT specialist and internet governance and digital policy expert in Togo, describes the gap between the political rhetoric surrounding AI and the basic infrastructure reality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Je qualifierai d'aberrant ce décalage entre les discours politiques sur l'IA et la réalité des infrastructures de base en Afrique subsaharienne.


Je pense que ces déclarations sont semblables à un saut dans le vide et qu'il ne sert à rien de mettre la charrue avant les bœufs. Il m'est inconcevable de réaliser n'importe quelle prouesse technologique dans un pays sans assainir et stabiliser le secteur énergétique prioritairement et doter le pays en question d'infrastructures de base: un réseau électrique efficace, efficient et opérationnel couvrant au moins 95% du territoire. L'on ne peut construire une tour (IA) sans la bonne fondation (infrastructure énergétique et de connectivité). I would say the gap between the political rhetoric surrounding AI and the basic infrastructure reality in Sub-Saharan Africa is untenable. I believe these pronouncements are like leaping into the unknown, and there’s no point getting ahead of ourselves. Achieving any technological feat in a country without first improving and stabilizing the energy sector and equipping it with basic infrastructure, such as an efficient and functional electricity grid that covers at least 95 percent of the country, is inconceivable to me. You cannot build a tower (AI) without a solid foundation (energy and connectivity infrastructure).


Expensive and slow internet connectivity Although electricity is the first obstacle that innovative projects encounter, poor-quality internet access delivers the fatal blow. Both elements are inextricably linked. While internet penetration in Africa is growing , bandwidth quality and speed remain another challenge Africans face. In 2024, Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 75 percent of the world’s expansion in mobile internet coverage. Yet, the continent’s internet penetration rate in rural areas remains among the lowest in the world. Internet quality poses particular problems for AI users. Its high latency makes the user experience frustrating and renders it unusable for real-time applications. Connection stability has become another crucial factor. Work sessions with AI tools that cut off every 10 minutes due to signal instability aren’t feasible for serious professional use. That said, in suburban and rural areas, this type of disruption remains the norm rather than the exception. Aside from the gross access rate, the relative cost of connectivity is of great concern. In many Sub-Saharan African countries, 1 GB of mobile data can cost between 2 and 10 percent of the average monthly income, making intensive use of cloud-based AI applications completely unaffordable for most.


Practical consequences Infrastructural constraints put Sub-Saharan Africa’s startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) wishing to incorporate AI into their workflows at a competitive disadvantage. We must first resolve the OpenAI API access issues before taking the next step. In practice, this disadvantage results in higher costs, VPN connections, expensive mobile data usage, longer lead times, and, sometimes, a complete inability to access the most advanced tools on the global market. AI is also expected to transform education through personalized learning, virtual tutors, automated assessments, and the generation of educational resources. However, all these promises require reliable internet access in educational establishments. According to UNESCO, the vast majority of primary and secondary schools in Sub-Saharan Africa are not connected to the internet. Under such circumstances, educational inequalities are likely to worsen further. Students in major connected cities will therefore benefit from educational AI tools, while those in rural areas will miss out. Solar energy: A promising but partial solution Due to a lack of centralized electricity grids, off-grid solar energy has emerged as an alternative solution in many rural areas.


Companies like M-Kopa in Kenya and Bboxx in several Eastern and Western African countries enable households without grid access to access solar energy through solar panels and pay-as-you-go systems. However, these solutions have their AI limitations. Small solar panels effectively power lamps, mobile phones, and even small household appliances, but cannot continuously power high-performance computers, Wi-Fi routers, and local servers required to run AI models locally. With AI meant to redefine access to knowledge, health, employment, and governance, connectivity is no longer just about convenience, but also about fairness and fundamental rights. As long as millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa don’t have access to reliable electricity or affordable internet, the rhetoric on “AI for all” will remain meaningless. While solutions such as solar energy, undersea cables, offline AI models, and targeted public and private investments exist, what’s missing is a political and economic commitment to addressing these challenges. Not only will Google DeepMind and Anthropic laboratories decide the future of AI, but also Niger’s classrooms without electricity, the Republic of the Congo’s rural health centers, and Nairobi’s startups that are innovating despite the constraints and creativity they entail.


The digital crown: Reclaiming human dignity in the age of AI

AI, like any other technology, is built for people and meant to be used by people. From a human rights perspective, the closest idea that shapes my view of AI comes from a concept my civics teacher taught me: democracy is government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In the same way, AI guided by human rights should embody these principles and be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Such an approach ensures that technology supports human dignity, freedom and well-being, rather than undermining them. It places human beings at its core and reflects the realities of human life. Human-centred AI should embed humanity as the foundation upon which systems are designed, built, used and governed. Regardless of who someone is, where they live, what they believe, or how they choose to live their life, AI should treat everyone with fairness and dignity. With this in mind, there are several important ways we can create and foster a human rights-based approach to AI.


Human rights in practice Anchored in human rights law and practice, I am fascinated by how the idea of “human rights” developed over time. In ancient history, early human rights laws were created to prevent those in power from mistreating others. One of the earliest examples is the Cyrus Cylinder (539 BC), which records King Cyrus the Great freeing slaves and declaring that people had the freedom to choose their own religion. During the Middle Ages, another milestone emerged with the Magna Carta in England, when rebels forced King John to accept that no one, not even the king, was above the law. This introduced the important concept of due process. In the 1700s, philosophers like John Locke argued that people possess natural rights simply because they are human, not because rulers grant them. These ideas influenced the United States’ Declaration of Independence (1776), which declared that all men are created equal, and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), which recognised individuals as citizens rather than as subjects of a king. After the horrors of World War II, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted.


It later inspired two binding treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), collectively known as the International Bill of Human Rights , which continues to shape laws and societies today. Human rights have been the base and continue to be the base on which other laws, including the constitutions of nations, are shaped and have a greater influence on how AI should be built and governed. We can and should approach the regulation of AI by taking into account the fundamental rights we have been advocating for centuries. Here, I offer an overview of this approach, considering five non-negotiable rights: The right to life and liberty, human-centred For AI to adhere to human rights, it must protect the right to life and liberty, which in this sense must never ignore the human-in-the-loop aspect. This includes putting human urgency as key, but also having human oversight. This aspect condemns the usage of AI in militarisation, given its power to perpetuate inhumane acts, including genocide.


AI needs to be built, used and governed in a manner that broadly follows a holistic safety approach that protects life and people’s freedom. The right to equality, algorithmic fairness and anti-bias The right to be treated the same as everyone else, regardless of race, gender or religion. Where AI treats all as equal, there are power imbalances in its design that need to be addressed. This starts from the data that trains the AI models to access and use AI-enabled infrastructures, such as compute power and frameworks. AI builders and/or regulatory frameworks/stakeholders need to be aware of systemic and structural biases in their datasets that could lead to exclusion of demographics of society, and seek to counter them through approaches that are inclusive and justice-oriented. One way to do this is by performing bias audits on training data, developing feedback loops and documenting to embody the principles of ethical and responsible AI that is explainable, accountable, transparent and fair. The right to speak freely This is often at risk in the age of AI-driven social media, search engines and generative AI.


Users have a right to know why certain information is being promoted to them and why other information is being hidden, but this is often not the case. With major languages mainstreamed and others not given the platform, more and more of speech is being limited, even blocked by robots and algorithms. AI is increasingly also being used to curb free speech, with bots and online trolls rising. It needs to be created with the belief that people have a right to speech. The right to essentials, equitable access and resource allocation AI can optimise how we distribute food, manage power grids, and provide remote health care. Human-centred AI ensures these benefits don't just go to the wealthiest nations or individuals. The main question to ask ourselves at this point is whether AI is being used to make essentials more affordable and accessible, or is it creating a digital divide where only those with high-speed tech get the best services? To ensure equity, inclusive design must be at the centre of how AI is built, used and governed.


The right to privacy, data sovereignty and consent AI is built of data, but there should be guardrails to how much data and what data it can use. It needs to prioritise data minimisation techniques like differential privacy, where noise is added to data so individuals can’t be identified, or federated learning, where you train AI on your device without your data ever leaving it. We must push for users to have the right to be forgotten by the AI. We must remember that privacy is a gateway right; without it, we cannot have freedom of expression or assembly. Without privacy being part and parcel of AI, we risk mass surveillance and even identity theft. If an AI system violates any of these five rights, there must be a legal way to seek redress. By grounding AI in the right to life, equality, speech, essentials and privacy, we ensure it serves as a mirror of our highest values, rather than a magnifier of our oldest biases. It is we, humans, who give AI purpose and urgency. The struggle for human rights has always been about shifting power from the few to the many, and today, the field is digital with tools such as AI.


The children who learn war before they learn the world

It was the end of 2023 when images from Gaza began to fill our television screens. I found myself returning to them again and again: the ruins, the sirens, the unbearable stillness of small bodies wrapped in white. The scale of destruction was immense. But what lingered were the faces of children — some gone, others injured, many too young to understand why their world had collapsed overnight. News reports spoke in numbers — casualties, statistics — but behind those numbers were stories that refused to leave the room even after the television was switched off. This is no longer a reality confined to conflict zones. In an age of constant connectivity, children across the world are being exposed to war in real time, through screens, conversations and the ambient anxiety of the adults around them. This article argues that such exposure is quietly reshaping childhood, even for those far removed from the battlefield.


I would often sit with my wife, discussing what we had just seen, trying to process a grief that did not belong to us, yet somehow did. And in all of this, I missed something important. I have two daughters. My elder one is nearly 15, old enough to understand the language of conflict. My younger one, just six, still lives in a world where questions are simple, and answers are expected to reassure. They were in the room more often than I realized — watching, listening, absorbing. At first, their reactions were subtle. A question here, a glance there. “Why are they crying?” my younger one once asked, pointing at the screen. I offered an answer that felt safe, something incomplete, something designed to protect. But children do not just hear words; they read faces, tones and silences. What I thought I had softened, they had already understood in their own way. Then, more recently, the distance between “there” and “here” began to collapse. As tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran intensified, the tone of the news shifted.


It was no longer just about another place. Reports mentioned the Gulf. Alerts flashed across screens. Words like “missiles” and “drones” entered everyday conversation, not as distant vocabulary, but as possibilities. Schools closed. The rhythm of daily life paused. And then came the moment that altered everything: the realization that Qatar, where we live, along with other Gulf countries, could itself be at risk. The headlines I had once consumed with a degree of separation were now unfolding uncomfortably close to home. I saw the fear before it was spoken. My elder daughter tried to remain composed, but her questions returned, faster this time, sharper. “Will it happen here?” “Are we safe?” There was no easy way to answer without confronting a truth I myself did not fully know. My younger one did not ask. She held on. A sudden sound made her flinch. A notification drew her attention instantly. The sky, once just an open expanse, had become something to watch carefully as if it could change without warning. It was then I understood what I had failed to see all along.


War does not need to reach your doorstep to enter your home. It arrives quietly, through a screen, through a headline, through conversations not meant for young ears. And by the time it feels real, it has already settled into the minds of children, shaping fears they do not yet have the words to explain. Research in child psychology has long shown that repeated exposure to violence, whether direct or mediated, can influence how children perceive safety and stability. In today’s 24-hour media environment, where graphic images and breaking alerts are constant, the boundary between distant conflict and personal reality is increasingly blurred. What was once filtered now arrives unmediated, often without the emotional tools needed to process it. We often measure war in terms of territory, power and political outcomes. But there is another cost, less visible and far more enduring. It is carried in the questions children begin to ask, in the silences they grow into and in the way they start to see the world, not as a place of possibility, but as something uncertain.


Childhood is meant to be a time of discovery — when the sky is just the sky, not something to fear. When loud sounds are moments of excitement, not signals of danger. When the world feels large, but safe. For many children today, that sense of safety is being quietly eroded. Some lose it in the direct shadow of conflict. Others lose parts of it from a distance, through repeated exposure, through unanswered questions, through a growing awareness that the world is not as secure as it once seemed. This raises difficult questions for parents, educators and media institutions alike. How much exposure is necessary for awareness, and when does it become overwhelming? Are we equipping children to understand what they see, or simply expecting them to absorb it? In trying to stay informed, we may be underestimating how deeply these moments settle in young minds. We cannot shield children from reality forever. Nor should we pretend that the world is untouched by conflict.


But somewhere between awareness and exposure, there is a line we are failing to draw, a line between informing and overwhelming, between preparing and frightening. Because when a child begins to fear the sky, something fundamental has already been lost. The sky was never meant to be a source of anxiety. It was meant for clouds that change shape, for birds that cross without borders, for stars that arrive quietly at night. Not for missiles. Not for drones. And yet, for many children today, the sky is no longer a place of wonder, but a question mark, something they look at not with curiosity, but with caution. And perhaps that is the most lasting damage of all — not what war destroys in the moment, but what it quietly rewrites for the future. Because long after the noise fades, these children will remember one thing: They learned to be afraid of the sky before they ever learned to fully understand the world beneath it.


This Earth Day, meet some of the Caribbean’s national birds

At Global Voices, we’re often amazed at how seemingly random things remind us of how interconnected we are. Last year, it was the quality and symbolism of light ; this year, after our Venezuelan contributor Estefanía Salazar shared a photo of the country's stunning national bird — the Venezuelan Troupial (Icterus icterus) — much to the delight of the rest of us in the region, it’s birds. Not only do our feathered friends travel long distances with no consideration for the risks posed by man-made borders, but they also share our spaces , contribute to the well-being of our environment — even as their habitats are threatened by development , hunting and more — and, because they move so effortlessly between earth and sky, are powerful symbols of freedom and transformation. According to the president of BirdLife Jamaica , Justin Saunders, “Birds, and especially our national birds, represent the resilience, pride, and significance of our countries and of the Caribbean region as a whole.


Though we are small island nations, we continue to have an outsized impact, and birds reflect that strength and identity in a powerful way. They also remind us of how interconnected we are across the region […] Birds are one of the few parts of nature that are truly accessible to almost everyone, regardless of age, background, or even disability, and that unifying quality is part of what makes them so meaningful to the people of [the] Caribbean.” This Earth Day, we offer you a glimpse at some of the region’s favourites… Antigua and Barbuda’s magnificence The national bird of these small islands is the Magnificent frigatebird ; in fact, Barbuda is home to the largest frigatebird colony in the western hemisphere. Locally, they are called “Weather birds” — whenever they circle inland, this behaviour is often interpreted as a reliable warning that a storm is approaching. Excellent hunters, fishermen often observe them to locate the best fishing grounds.


Posing prettily in The Bahamas A perfect match for its blue waters and white sand beaches, the national bird of The Bahamas is the Caribbean flamingo ( Phoenicopterus ruber ), and its Inagua National Park , established in 1965, boasts the largest breeding site of Caribbean flamingos in the world — about 70,000 — quite an impressive figure, considering the species was once considered in danger of extinction. The popular pelican Various regional nations have adopted the Brown pelican ( Pelicanus occidentalis ) as their national bird, including Barbados , St. Kitts and Nevis , the Turks and Caicos , and St. Maarten, where it adorns the respective countries’ coat of arms . The bird can also be seen perched atop the crest of the University of the West Indies. Up until the 1950s, there was a small island off Barbados’ west coast, aptly named “ Pelican Island ” after the brown pelicans that nested there in large numbers. However, the waters between Barbados and Pelican Island were reclaimed to build the Bridgetown Deep Water Harbour, and today, you only get rare glimpses of them.


In St. Maarten, meanwhile, the main pelican nesting site at Fort Amsterdam has been showing declining numbers . Phenomenal parrots Dominica, widely known as “The Nature Island,” has a national bird found nowhere else. Known as the Imperial amazon (Amazona imperialis) or Dominican amazon parrot, fondly called the sisserou by locals, it is unfortunately a critically endangered species , with a current population trend of just 40-60 mature parrots in the wild. Their numbers have been declining due to threats such as habitat loss, climate change, and hunting. St. Lucia also has a parrot as its national bird — its namesake, the Saint Lucia amazon (Amazona versicolor). Endemic to the island, it is considered a vulnerable species . Locals call it the Jacquot and, as one birdwatching blog recalls , the bird was in rapid decline in the 1970s because of hunting, until local environmentalists launched an awareness campaign and started going into schools dressed as parrots: “Their aim was to stress to pupils that the bird should be honoured, not hunted.”


The following year, the country’s parliament passed a law making it illegal to kill the St. Lucia parrot. Such an offence is now considered unthinkable and comes with a hefty fine and jail time. St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ parrot of choice is the indigenous Amazona guildingii , or St. Vincent parrot , which struggled in the wake of the 2021 Soufrière volcano eruption . It is currently listed as vulnerable , though the date of that assessment preceded the series of volcanic eruptions . The bird, locally called “Vincie,” is regarded as a national treasure . More endemic species Grenada is another regional territory whose national bird, the Grenada dove (Leptotila wellsi), is native to the island where it lives. Sadly, it is also listed as critically endangered . The most recent assessment in 2021 determined the presence of just 136–182 mature birds in the wild. Its numbers are being compromised by development and the negative impacts of the climate crisis, including pollution and invasive species. Many Grenadians have been trying to save the dove, citing its ecological significance and its role in heritage and national pride.


Haiti also honours a species endemic to the island of Hispaniola — the Hispaniolan trogon (Priotelus roseigaster) — as its national bird, underscoring the unique biodiversity of the species and the need to preserve it. Despite threats to its habitat, the Kanson wouj (“Red underpants”), as it is called in Haitian Kreyòl, is currently a species of least concern on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, contributing to Haitians’ perception of the trogon as a symbol of resilience . The bird is often depicted in Haitian art and folklore. Jamaica’s ‘Doctor Bird’ When Jamaica gained its independence from Britain in 1962, the country’s National Birds Act declared the Red-billed streamertail (Trochilus polytmus) — the most common of Jamaica’s hummingbird species — as the national bird, thanks to both its endemic status and its popularity. Jamaicans fondly refer to this hummingbird as “ Doctor Bird .” It has been the topic of many a Jamaican folklore tale and folk song, and forms a significant part of the island’s cultural identity .


Twin islands, two birds At the southernmost end of the Caribbean archipelago, Trinidad and Tobago may be one nation, but it has two national birds — Trinidad’s Scarlet ibis (Eudocimus ruber) and Tobago’s Rufous-vented chachalaca (Ortalis ruficauda), commonly called the Cocrico, after the sound of its call. Both species enjoy a current status of least concern . As BirdCaribbean Executive Director Lisa Sorenson told Global Voices via WhatsApp, “Caribbean birds, especially our endemic species, connect people to place, culture, and nature. The Caribbean is home to 185 endemic bird species; by protecting [them] and their habitats, we safeguard the health and well-being of our communities and the ecosystems we all depend on. Birds are among the most visible symbols of our natural heritage, inspiring national pride and reminding us that our islands are home to extraordinary biodiversity found nowhere else on earth. Our islands also provide essential habitat for migratory birds, offering food, water, and shelter during their long journeys between breeding and wintering grounds. On Earth Day, we celebrate the beauty and diversity of the natural world — and the joy, wonder, and peace that birds bring to our lives every day.”


The challenge of civic trust as AI plays a bigger role in public management

I teach at and live on a public university campus in Hong Kong. At the beginning of every academic year, there is a steady stream of scam warnings: posters on campus, emails, student notices, reminders from the institution, posters splattered across MTR stations, and newspaper headlines. Be careful with suspicious links, fraudulent calls, fake payment requests, manipulated identities, messages that sound urgent and plausible enough to make you double-check. Especially after the headline-making incident in which an employee was duped by a deepfake video call with his company's financial chief into transferring millions, there has been increased and repeated messaging that AI is here to stay and that we are not prepared for it. I find it ironic that one of the demographic groups most targeted by this message of potential AI-based scam is young students, who are often described as digital natives, instinctively literate in the languages of platforms, devices, and online life.


Something has changed in our digital practices where caution has become the latest buzzword, because we can no longer trust whether what we see is what we get, and I do not think it is merely about the proliferation and persistence of fake news and misinformation. It is about the conditions of trust: not only our capacity to trust the digital information we encounter, but our capacity to trust our own judgment in everyday AI interactions. Earlier debates about digital misinformation often focused on circulation: a rumour spreading too quickly, a manipulated image going viral, a false claim taking hold before it could be corrected. Those were serious problems, but they still assumed that falsehood was something inserted into an otherwise readable environment. With generative AI, we have entered a space where plausibility, not falsehood, has become cheap, scalable, ambient, and normal. It floods the digital with things that are not obviously fake, but also not reliably true, producing a kind of cognitive fatigue and surrender. Human collectives can survive disagreement, but we have not yet figured out how to live with continuous distortion. What is being eroded is not only trust in the information we encounter, but trust in our own capacity to deal with and negotiate these generative AI plausibilities.


Hong Kong’s recent emphasis on anti-fraud measures shows that deepfake scams and other forms of digitally mediated deception have become serious enough that the response now includes technical systems, such as scameter+ , designed to identify or interrupt them. Financial authorities have openly described this as a new terrain in which AI must be used to fight AI . It means that trust is no longer restored by human recognition, but increasingly depends on technical verification layered on top of technical production. This is the civic paradox at the heart of the current moment. The more synthetic and artificial plausibility overwhelms everyday judgment, the more verification becomes a specialised service. Institutions of reliability, or persons of trust known to us through proximity and relationality, are being replaced by a stack of systems that claim to tell us what is authentic. When a voice needs forensic checking, a message needs a platform signal, and a public interaction has to pass through a chatbot, a filter, a detection layer, and only then return as something we are meant to accept as reliable, civic trust begins to migrate away from shared social processes and into managed technical infrastructures.


While much of this is dealt with at the level of fraud detection and prevention, the consequences are far broader. Consider what happens when AI becomes embedded in the ordinary interfaces of public life: enquiry systems, service kiosks, governance application processes, translation tools, payment gateways, automated assistance, and a wider rollout of AI across the workflows of everyday management of the city. The presence of AI is justified through a reorganisation around speed, legibility, and efficiency, things that Hong Kong characteristically folds into its image as a dense, high-speed, hyper-connected city of neon-hued optimisation. However, in this new scenario, where AI systems hold the power to verify and manage our interactions with each other and the city, civic encounters become increasingly processual and procedural. The citizen becomes a user. The public question becomes a query. And in the current policy direction for building a smart city , AI becomes central to an accelerated and expanded public-service delivery system. But efficiency, on its own, does not create civic trust. A public institution does not become more civic merely because it becomes more automated.


As is becoming apparent in the public hearings investigating the disaster of the fire in a residential estate in Tai Po, civic trust requires people to understand how decisions are made, where errors can be challenged, and how responsibility is distributed when something goes wrong. The challenge of civic trust in the face of AI is going to be temporal as much as technical. Calls for AI literacy, fluency, and caution are only going to be effective if we also change our public vocabularies for describing what these systems do: For instance, if we start calling AI systems systems of decision making rather than systems of automation, or think about input as capture, it changes how we relate to these technologies. Because by the time a harm is visible, the system already seems to have moved. In work around technology-facilitated gender and sexual violence, we know that by the time a synthetic image is debunked, the social effect has already travelled. By the time safeguards are written, the interface has already been normalised. We are always catching up. And this catching up produces a collective mistrust in our own ability to recognise what is happening while it is happening.


Verification is often offered as the necessary solution to these questions, but it is insufficient. If civic life is reduced to an endless cycle of detection, correction, and response, then public trust becomes permanently defensive. We stop asking what kinds of relations technology should make possible, and instead settle for damage control. What would it mean to think differently? At the Digital Narratives Studio, which I direct, we begin with a modest but important shift: moving from asking how AI can improve civic services to asking what kinds of civic relations those services should sustain. Efficiency and safety are necessary, but so are hesitation, explanation, and the possibility of remaining answerable to one another, even when our encounters are increasingly shaped by synthetic systems. We call this relational infrastructuring. If trust is being displaced from shared social processes into technical systems of synthetic plausibility and verification, then the response cannot simply be better detection or louder warnings. I also do not hold a nostalgic wish to return to a time before technological mediations, as if that were even real.


We have to stay with the technologies that now organize civic life, but refuse to accept the narratives of decision-making and trust that they offer. For us, it means creating embodied, shared processes through which people can name what they are encountering, compare experiences, share interpretations, test judgment together, and build a collective vocabulary for the new conditions that AI has normalized. In our work, this takes the form of small experiments in language, relation, and possibility. Through informal and semi-structured gatherings, always over food, we create spaces where people can describe how AI-driven systems enter their everyday lives, and where new civic vocabularies can emerge from lived experience rather than technical prescription alone. I do not want to prescribe a language as if there is one settled one, but do try and think about how you would understand the futures of AI, the histories they consolidate, and the experience they unsettle if you had to incorporate terms like the unsettled, entanglement, dirty mirror, toxic intimacy, grief, and companionship as a part of describing AI in your everyday life.


We extend this into practices of relational language modelling — a practice that doesn't mimic machine correlations but human relationship building as a way of shaping and interpreting the data set, where human intention, social context, mutual accountability, and shared anxiety can be named, and become central to how we imagine civic engagement with AI. And we pair this with a commitment possibility: insisting that AI is still unsettled, still open to being shaped otherwise, and that the language and vocabulary it comes with, is not something we just accept. This bottom-up approach is not scalable or easy, but it is grounded in the idea that we live with and through technologies and don’t merely stand outside and critique them. We think through rebuilding the relational conditions within which technologies are encountered, interpreted and made accountable so that we are not merely looking to verify what is real, but to create publics capable of making meaning together.


Between the algorithmisation of territories and the monoculture of data: Are there paths towards AI that respect rights and life?

The question “What can be done to create and promote a human rights-based approach to artificial intelligence?” generally leads us to circulate through abstract, universalist realms of ethical principles, regulatory frameworks and innovation per se . However, when this series challenged me to write an article answering this question from my own experience as a researcher, I felt it needed to be grounded in concrete realities, where artificial intelligence, automation and digitalisation are already being deployed in territories, and their impacts are felt by specific bodies, biomes and communities. It was this need to materialise the debate that led me to the path of action-research I developed, in co-authorship with Joana Varon at Coding Rights, for the Tramas Project of the Coalizão Feminista Decolonial pela Justiça Digital e Ambiental (Decolonial Feminist Coalition for Digital and Environmental Justice). Throughout this research, we came to understand that the question of a human rights-oriented AI ceases to be speculative and becomes urgent and situated.


Who controls these tools, in whose service do they operate and which forms of existence do they erase? When we turn our attention to the trends and narratives currently shaping the large agribusiness industry, we are immediately transported into a reality resembling a dystopian science fiction script. Far removed from the traditional image of the farmer with a hoe in hand, working in communion with the land, the fields managed by industry giants consist of thousands of hectares with virtually no people and no agricultural diversity. Digitalised agribusiness is masculine and patriarchal, in contrast to the imaginary of traditional, family-based agriculture, in which the reproduction of life was carefully and delicately cultivated by nature. It is hyperconnected, aseptic and dominated by heavy machinery that resembles spaceships or war tanks. This is agribusiness orchestrated by the predatory symbiosis between the world’s largest technology companies, massive agribusiness conglomerates and vast flows of financial capital. It is a powerful alliance between Big Tech, Big Agro and Big Money . Unmasking false narratives Investigating the brutal impacts of the digitalisation of Brazilian monoculture and the web of economic power within it raises critical questions about this model.


In a context where digital technologies, artificial intelligence and connectivity present themselves as inevitable forces of land expulsion, what can and should be done to create and promote an approach to technological and AI advances that is grounded in the defence of rights? To address this contradiction, the mask has to be stripped away from the industry’s discourse. The hegemonic narrative, promoted at major trade fairs and technology events, celebrates so-called “precision agriculture” or the “digitalisation of agriculture”. Swarms of sensors spread across the land, remote monitoring, automated fleet management and complex predictive models based on artificial intelligence are marketed as magical technological solutions to all the disasters caused by monoculture itself, from accelerated soil degradation, to pest infestations resulting from lack of diversity, to labour shortages. In the parallel universe created by the corporate sector, the imminent climate collapse simply does not exist. The promised future is always one of control and abundance, guaranteed by digital technology and the precision that only AI can provide. The grand promise of the alliance between Big Agro and Big Tech is that vast expanses of monocultivated land will be accessible at the touch of a mobile phone screen, with colossal harvesters and tractors being operated remotely, turning the management of life into a cold video game.


It is precisely at this point in the discourse that the most serious breach of fundamental rights emerges. Unrestricted digitalisation consolidates a model in which human presence – intimate, direct and respectful engagement with the land – no longer prevails. Empirical knowledge of the territory, refined over centuries and passed down through generations by traditional communities, is summarily discarded as obsolete. We are witnessing an overwhelming ontological mutation, in which our labour relations, commercial ties, affections and interactions with nature are structurally transforming and being reduced to an immense and humanly unmanageable quantity of data. The entire complexity of biomes and those who inhabit them is extracted, chewed up and processed into AI algorithms, and stored in an obscure technological “cloud”. This invisible infrastructure dictates all solutions and pathways for maximising monoculture business. The effect of this generalised digitalisation is the brutal erasure of forms of existence deemed undesirable by capital. Within this narrative, traditional communities and longstanding land conflicts virtually disappear beneath distant satellite imagery. Villages, riverside settlements and Quilombola territories are not computed by the monitors of remote operators.


As they are invisible to algorithms trained to see only commodities, these populations are ignored by public authorities, who become dazzled by modernity and delegate governance to the digital realm. Impacts on lived realities This programmed invisibility materialises as violence and dispossession in rural areas of the country, as seen in the Cerrado region of Matopiba in Brazil (an area encompassing parts of the Brazilian states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia), which currently constitutes the country’s main agricultural expansion frontier . There, the advent of technological “innovations” and the narratives of digitalised agribusiness set the tone for violent displacement, adding to longstanding agrarian conflicts. The case of the traditional community of Gleba Tauá in northern Tocantins exemplifies the weight of this alliance. (Data from the Matopiba region and Gleba Tauá were obtained through research collaboration with Antônia Laudeci Oliveira Moraes.) Families who have occupied the territory for nearly a century are seeing their homes being strangled by new technologies of expulsion manipulated by land grabbers. Land grabbing is the loose English translation of “grilagem de terras,” a term used in Brazil to describe the illegal appropriation of public or private land through the falsification of documents such as deeds and registrations.


It is linked to fraud, corruption, illegal deforestation and violence against traditional peoples. The term originates from an old practice of artificially aging fake papers in boxes with crickets (“grilos”) so that they appear authentic. The digitalisation of land management, driven by self-declaratory mechanisms such as the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), institutionalises digital land grabbing . In the Matopiba region, the digitalisation of land records via the CAR system overlays irregular registrations that generate a digital land dispute, rendering traditional territorial occupations invisible and paving the way for massive deforestation of the Cerrado. As satellites and automated validation systems are unable to distinguish between the historical occupation of traditional communities and recent invasions driven by illegal deforestation, large landowners use digital platforms to register public and collective lands as their private property. The result is the creation of a “ Fictitious Brazil ,” in which algorithmic registration generates financial assets on the market, legitimising the encirclement of communities and concealing deforestation. And when the erasure promoted by databases is not enough to dissuade communities from asserting their rights, technology reveals its armed face.


Drones marketed under the pretext of sustainability and precision have been deployed as instruments of terror. Unmanned devices circle agro-ecological properties in an intimidating manner, spraying clouds of agrochemicals over the homes, water sources and gardens of small producers. Small farmers are overflown by these technological tools that disseminate fear, cornering and driving them out. How can technologies be integrated without violating rights? When we witness the imposition of this model upon territories, coded as unquestionable progress, we are compelled to ask how digital technology, grounded in data and artificial intelligence, can be integrated into rural life in ways that respect and guarantee rights. The first step is to abandon the fallacy of technological and algorithmic neutrality and to question the underlying architecture of power embedded in these systems. At the core of the debate on human rights in the digital age must be an effort to unveil what these tools serve and, above all, who controls them. An AI that respects rights and advances humanity must be conceived with transparency and decentralised governance. Concealing land grabbing processes, spreading fear, dehumanising relationships, or optimising socio-environmental destruction cannot be admissible practices.


Public technological infrastructures must be redesigned to incorporate collective participation, ensuring that they are used to map and protect social territorialities and diversity, rather than to erase them beneath a standardised green veil imposed via satellite. Moreover, forging a rights-based approach requires dismantling of techno-solutionism. We must understand that answers to the sustainability of life and the defence of biodiversity will not come from Big Tech or Big Agro. These actors must remain under constant scrutiny by public authorities and civil society. We must recognise the superior validity of regenerative, agro-ecological and ancestral technologies. [9] Highly technologised agribusiness marginalises these practices, yet it is traditional smallholder plots, dense networks of exchange among communities, heirloom seeds and small farmers’ ancestral reading of climate patterns that truly preserve socio-environmental justice and ensure food security. Solutions such as drone fleets or predictions based on big data are violent and, in most cases, serve only to guarantee agribusiness profits at the expense of diversity and life. The path toward a human-centred AI requires humanity to recover the essence of cooperation.


In her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, feminist science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin suggests that the great technology of survival should not be the weapon that wounds, conquers and sprays poison from the sky, but rather the human vessel that gathers seeds, weaves networks of mutual care and preserves knowledge. We must abandon the cold, dystopian logic of patriarchal domination if AI is not to become the executioner of our future. The development of an AI that guarantees rights and preserves life must be non-negotiably subordinate to socio-environmental justice, embracing the ancestral premise that, within the great technological web of existence, we are not isolated manipulators at the top of a chain, as articulated by the Quilombola thinker Nêgo Bispo (Antônio Bispo dos Santos). We must always bear in mind that “the land gives, the land demands.” Some references for this article could not be incorporated on the Global Voices site. You can see them on the Association for Progressive Communication website . Mariana Tamari is a journalist and researcher working at the intersection of politics, feminisms, technology and socio-environmental justice.


A founding partner of Agência Mira, a strategic political communications consultancy, she previously served as co - executive director of Coding Rights, where she led research, projects, institutional operations and a multidisciplinary team. Prior to that, she held positions as regional program me officer at ARTI GO 19 Bra s il , the Fundação Rosa Luxemburgo and Cisco Networking Academy. She also served as partnerships director at Mapeo – AI and Big Data. Trained in journalism, she worked as a reporter for Folha de S.Paulo and Reuters News Agency, and has contributed to numerous media outlets in Brazil, including Revista A Rede , Brasil de Fato and Carta Capital, among ot h ers. Paula Villar was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. She graduated with a degree in psychology and completed a postgraduate course in clinical psychology. Although she has been drawing since a very young age, it was only during the COVID-19 pandemic that Paula decided to change careers, devoting herself to digital art and activism. In addition, she also works with other media, such as oil paint, realistic pencil drawings and Indian ink.


Nepal becomes South Asia's priciest place to fill a tank as US war on Iran rattles the pump

As reported by Rising Nepal Daily , Sumitra Khatiwada, a resident of Kathmandu on a fixed monthly income, has watched the cost of running her household climb week after week since March 2026. Cooking gas, vegetables, transport — everything is going up at once. “If prices continue to rise, life will become even more difficult for workers,” she said, urging the government to strengthen market monitoring and prevent artificial price hikes. Her concern mirrors a crisis spreading across Nepal. Nepal raised fuel prices for the fourth time in a single month in April 2026, making petroleum products the most expensive among regional peers. Under the revised rates, petrol in Kathmandu now costs NPR 219 per litre (USD 1.48), while diesel is priced at NPR 207 (USD 1.40) per litre. A war far away, a crisis close to home Nepal Oil Corporation stated that due to the ongoing war in West Asia, international market prices for petroleum products have been continuously rising.


The conflict involving the United States, Israel, and Iran has disrupted export flows through the Strait of Hormuz, through which nearly a third of the world’s seaborne oil passes. As per a report by Rising Nepal Daily , petrol had been priced at just NPR 137 per litre (USD 0.93) in January 2026. Over just 18 days, petrol prices jumped by NPR 45 per litre, a 60 percent surge in under three weeks,while diesel and kerosene rose by NPR 40 per litre, a pace of increase Nepal had not seen even at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. Nepal’s vulnerability runs deeper than most of its neighbours. As per independent digital media platform The Logical Indian , Nepal is completely dependent on imported petroleum products, with the NOC functioning as the exclusive importer and distributor, largely sourcing supplies from India under a long-standing bilateral arrangement. More than 60 percent of petroleum consumption is accounted for by the transportation sector. According to the Department of Customs , in the first seven months of fiscal year 2025/26, Nepal spent NPR 139.10 billion (about USD 1 billion) on imports of petrol, diesel, and LPG alone.


As noted by Nepal News , with no domestic refining capacity and a single supplier pipeline, there is almost no policy buffer when prices spike internationally. The most expensive pump in South Asia A regional comparison makes Nepal’s position stark. Nepal’s petrol has reached NPR 219 per litre (USD 1.48), above Pakistan (USD 1.36), Sri Lanka (USD 1.30), India (USD 1.02), Bhutan (USD 1.06), the Maldives (USD 1.04), Afghanistan (about USD 0.95), and Bangladesh (USD 0.87). As per a report from Nepal-based digital news and social media platform PressAdda , even countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which are going through their own economic crises, have cheaper petrol prices than Nepal. The pump price is only the beginning of the impact. Diesel was priced at NPR 139 per litre in February, meaning it jumped by 31 percent within a single month. The World Bank projected Nepal’s economic growth to slow to 2.3 percent in fiscal year 2025–26, down from 4.6 percent in 2024–25, partly reflecting the impact of the conflict in Western Asia. The price of rice has already increased by NPR 100 to 200 (about USD 0.75 to 1.50) per 25-kg sack, while vegetables remain expensive.


Price watchdogs warn that fuel costs act as a multiplier across the supply chain; a small increase at the pump can mean significantly higher prices for food, transport, and household essentials within weeks. Transport fares are now officially higher too. The Department of Transport Management approved a 16.71 percent rise in passenger fares on inter-provincial routes, with cargo rates rising by 21.68 percent on hill routes and 15.75 percent on Tarai routes. “As freight charges have increased by three times, market prices could rise by up to 50 percent. If tensions escalate further, it will be a disaster,” said Rajendra Sangraula, president of the Nepal Freight Forwarders Association. A new government’s first economic test Nepal’s Rastriya Swatantra Party government, led by Prime Minister Balendra Shah , known popularly as Balen, came to power following elections in March 2026. Those elections were held after the previous KP Sharma Oli government collapsed following the September 2025 Gen Z protests , which were partly driven by public anger over economic mismanagement and a government-ordered social media ban.


The RSP government has introduced several emergency measures to manage the crisis. As reported by Rising Nepal Daily , a Cabinet meeting reduced customs duty and infrastructure tax on fuel by 50 percent to ensure smooth supply. The government also introduced a two-day weekend, Saturday and Sunday, for government offices and educational institutions to cut fuel consumption. According to Ratopati , fuel quotas for high-ranking government officials have been reduced, and wholesale fuel distribution is being controlled. Meanwhile, due to acute LPG shortages, the NOC has been directing distributors to supply only half-filled cooking gas cylinders to households to stretch limited stocks. But these steps have not reversed the trend. Despite the 50 percent tax exemption, the impact has been minimal due to the continuous rise in crude oil prices globally. According to Ratopati , NOC Executive Director Chandika Bhatta reported a fortnightly loss of approximately NPR 14 billion (about USD 105 million), NPR 930 million daily, based on data from March 30 to April 8, 2026. A governance gap has also emerged inside the ministry itself.


A ministry official was quoted as saying the absence of a dedicated minister is making it difficult to reach decisions on price adjustments, noting that deciding whether to control inflation or to facilitate supply through automatic pricing “is only possible at the political level.” Consumer groups have publicly called for more. “The higher fuel price has already started to impact consumers. The corporation seems focused only on calculating its losses,” said Prem Lal Maharjan, president of the National Consumer Forum. “Who will hear consumer grievances?” Citizens take to the streets and to social media The anger has moved beyond private frustration. On April 16, Joint Student Unions organised a protest at Maitighar, a central public square in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, demanding the immediate repeal of taxes imposed on petroleum products. Protesters carried placards calling for a price adjustment and a relief package for the public, with student leaders warning of further agitation if the government fails to act. On social media, where nearly 48 percent of Nepal’s population is active, one of the highest rates in South Asia, the fuel crisis has become a defining public debate.


For a government that rode the wave of digital populism and benefited from it, analysts have noted that navigating these challenges will be a daunting task. The trucking sector has also formally objected. The Federation of Truck Transport Entrepreneurs of Nepal issued a statement saying the price hike has angered consumers and will directly affect the transport sector, reminding authorities of a prior written agreement requiring automatic fare adjustments whenever fuel prices fluctuate by more than NPR 5 per litre. The bigger structural question Economists point to a vulnerability that will outlast this crisis. Economist Gunakar Bhatta told Rising Nepal Daily that the prolonged energy crisis is increasing supply-side pressures across both imported and domestically produced goods. “When the prices of food and non-food items increase, people are forced to spend more to sustain their livelihoods,” he said. Former National Planning Commission Vice Chairman Dipendra Bahadur Kshetri warned that if military actions targeting Iran continue, Nepali workers in Gulf countries could lose their jobs, a critical risk given that remittances totalled NPR 1.261 trillion (about USD 8.45 billion) in the first seven months of fiscal year 2025/26 alone.


NOC has warned that prices could rise by a further 20 to 30 percent, with the corporation owing NPR 16.37 billion (USD 123 million) to the Indian Oil Corporation, its sole supplier, with the next payment due April 23. Yet analysts point to a longer-term path out. Nepal already generates over 90 percent of its electricity from hydropower, and the country has been among the fastest EV adopters in South Asia. As Climate Home News reported , electric vehicles now make up about three-quarters of new car sales in Nepal, partly due to tax policies cutting EV import duties to 43 percent compared with 257 percent for petrol vehicles. While private EV adoption is growing, long-haul public transport and freight vehicles remain almost entirely dependent on diesel, meaning the crisis hitting ordinary Nepalis today is also the strongest argument yet for the government to accelerate the green transition. For Sumitra Khatiwada and millions of others on fixed incomes, the next NOC price announcement is not an abstraction. It is next week’s grocery bill.


Brazil: A warning on how AI and deepfakes can become an ’excessive risk‘ to women and girls

In November 2023, a group of parents from a school in Rio de Janeiro reported to the police that teenagers were creating and sharing nudes created using Artificial Intelligence (AI) featuring other classmates. Less than a year later, in September 2024, in the state of Bahia , another group of teens was also suspected of using AI to create pornographic images of other classmates, while in Mato Grosso state , students were expelled after sharing AI images featuring a teacher and other students in pornography communities on social media. These are some recent cases reported on Brazilian media and mentioned in a technical note published by the independent research center Internetlab in early April, 2026. The document aims to discuss “ways of combating online violence against girls and women in Brazil” and recommend regulatory discussions within the country’s context. According to the Brazilian Public Security Forum, in 2025 alone, Brazil registered 1.568 femicides , a 4.7 percent increase compared to the previous year and the highest number recorded since the law naming this type of crime was signed 10 years before. An increase in gender violence cases reported in the news led to protests at the end of 2025.


And the growing amount of misogynistic content online is “feeding the violence,” Deutsche Welle reports . To Clarice Tavares, Internetlab’s research director and one of the technical note’s authors, who talked to Global Voices, gender violence cases both online and offline are all part of the same misogynistic structure, coexisting and codependent on each other. “We are going through a complex moment of growing violence against women, and we need public policies to look at these contexts, in their specificities,” she analyzes. Talking about AI and gender issues, Tavares notes that databases used to feed platforms can be biased and, therefore, influence their results. Internetlab chose to look at violence related to AI in the technical note, she explains, because of its broader impact and the possibility of addressing it through proper regulation. Among other points, Internetlab’s document points to risks associated with “non-consensual sexual content deepfakes” and argues for the possibility of this happening to be classified as “excessive risk,” noting that “these technologies affect women and girls disproportionately”: Uma pesquisa conduzida pela Security Hero demonstrou que deepfakes sexualmente explícitas representam 98% de todos os vídeos de deepfake online, e que 99% das pessoas alvo desses conteúdos eram mulheres.


A pesquisa também indicou um aumento de 464% do número de deepfakes sexuais entre 2022 e 2023. A research conducted by Security Hero showed that sexually explicit deepfakes represent 98 percent of all deepfake videos online, and that 99 percent of the people targeted with this type of content are women. The study also indicated an increase of 464 percent in sexual deepfakes between 2022 and 2023. Although Tavares states that the problems are not exclusive to one platform, she points to Grok , X's embedded AI, as the tip of the iceberg, exposing a broader problem already spread online. I think this case calls for attention, since the AI that made it possible to create this sort of content was already part of its own social media, which helped to amplify the reach of such content. It was very much on the surface. I think it's a systemic issue, but Grok’s case made it impossible not to discuss it or worry about the current state of things.