This article is part of the series "Don't Ask AI, Ask A Peer" - a collaboration between GenderIT.org, APC.org, and Global Voices. You can read about it in the editorial here. We asked the author: "Why is it vital to value human creativity and connection in the age of AI?" The following article is their interpretation of the question.
I have a complicated relationship with the call to “centre the human” in artificial intelligence. On the surface, it seems like a humanist corrective to the growing mechanisation of life. However, the issue has a complex genealogy. For centuries, countless forms of non‑human intelligence ‒ from animal and ecological systems to ancestral and spiritual intelligences – have been dismissed or subordinated within a hierarchy built around a narrow notion of “the human”. That notion has historically been structured by white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and cisheteronormativity. It assumes that rational, productive, self‑contained subjectivity is the universal human standard. To centre “the human” in AI often ends up centring that particular template.
My discomfort also comes from how the distinction between the natural and the artificial shapes moral boundaries around who or what gets to count as real, embodied, or alive. This distinction has long informed political and cultural forms of othering – not only towards machines or non‑humans, but also toward people whose bodies, genders or abilities are socially coded as “unnatural”. The hierarchy between natural and artificial is therefore not neutral; it is a moral framework that polices the edges of humanity itself.
When we re‑centre the human in AI, we risk reinstating this hierarchy rather than undoing it. We risk reinscribing the same epistemological borders that determine whose intelligence, creativity or agency matters. What if instead of recentring the human, we expanded our sense of relation – recognising that intelligence, consciousness and care take multiple, entangled forms across species, systems and technological networks? This does not mean romanticising machines or erasing human experience, but rather acknowledging that we have never been separate from the artificial or the planetary in the first place.
At the same time, I understand why the language of “centring the human” has gained traction. The global ecosystem of big tech has indeed overwhelmed collective life, automating cognitive, creative and affective processes that once depended on human labour and cooperation. Since at least 2022, the acceleration of planetary computation has intensified the fear of replacement – not only of jobs, but of meaning, perception and creativity itself. These concerns are real. Automation has become a political and existential force. But to respond by reaffirming the centrality of “the human” may only reproduce the exclusions that made this crisis possible.
For me, working with AI means engaging with these tensions: reclaiming technology as part of Indigenous, gender-expansive and diasporic sovereignty, while resisting the temptation to fix the human as the ultimate measur