On Centring the Human: Reimagining Intelligence in the Age of AI

• The concept of "centring the human" in AI often reinforces historical hierarchies of white supremacy, patriarchy, and ableism rather than challenging them.
• AI-generated content creates a "crisis of the real," where saturated visuality competes with reality and erodes trust in images as evidence.
• Sovereign, community-grounded approaches to AI involve shifting from extractive data practices to intentional, consent-based, and smaller-scale archives.
• Creativity should be expanded to recognize intelligence as an entangled process involving human, machine, ancestral, and ecological systems.

The Problem with "Human-Centred" AI

• Historic notions of the "universal human" are based on a narrow standard of rational, self-contained subjectivity.
• The distinction between "natural" and "artificial" has been used as a tool for "othering" people, bodies, and genders deemed unnatural.
• Re-centring this version of humanity in AI risks replicating the same epistemological exclusions that caused current social and existential crises.

Visual Culture and the Crisis of the Real

• Historically, images served to stabilize reality and provide shared reference points; today, they destabilize it.
• Data models are not neutral; they are outcomes of labor, environmental extraction, and non-consensual harvesting of cultural knowledge.
• Current social media platforms favor content optimized for scale, engagement, and replication over depth, intention, or authorship.

Toward a New Framework for Creativity

• Artists can move beyond binary "refusal vs. embrace" debates to treat AI as an unstable collaborator.
• Practical strategies for ethical AI practice include:
  • Building situated, consent-based datasets that act as "gatherings" rather than extractive mines.
  • Developing smaller, slower, and more localized models that reject the demand for planetary-scale consumption.
  • Redefining artistic rigour to focus on intentionality and the health of worlds rather than the mere output of content.
• Following the work of Ruha Benjamin, there is a need to combine the dismantling of harmful systems with the active creation and imagination of new, sovereign worlds.