Computer Says Maybe

Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Fernanda Rodriguez, Angela Chukunzira, and Kauna Love Malgwi make it clear that colonial powers have never gone away. The people and technology powering them have just changed, and one of them is AI…
More Like This: REAL Resistance: Against Automated Governments

This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML, featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global network.
In this conversation, four guests from the network discuss how the business of AI continues legacies of colonialism in Brazil, Mexico, and Kenya:
AI companies are taking land in Querétaro for data center expansion, and they’re doing it without asking first. Paola Ricaurte Quijano explains that these are the mechanisms of dispossession at play — and it’s nothing new.
The government in Brazil are adopting a risk-based approach for AI regulation; Fernanda Rodriguez demonstrates the problems with this approach, and how they disproportionately harm Black people.
African data workers suffer the worst mental health harms when compared to other localities. Angela Chukunzira and Kauna Love Malgwi have worked to build a resistance movement for oppressed workers, and a framework for decolonising mental health.
Further reading & resources:
A Mental Health Intervention for Data Workers — Kauna Ibrahim Malgwi
"It's not drought, it's plunder" Querétaro, the valley of data centers — By Paola Ricaurte Quijano and Teresa Roldán Soria, July 2025
Facial recognition surveillance in São Paulo could worsen racism — Al Jazeera, 2023
The Feminist AI Research Network
More about the African Content Moderators Union
Iris — The Institute for Research on Internet and Society
Siasa Place — a youth organisation that helped tech workers who had been dismissed
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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

Maria Pilar Llorens, Divij Joshi, Gabriel Geiger, and Purity Mukami reveal how digitised welfare is not welfare — it’s just efficiency theatre.
More like this: REAL Resistance: The AI Information Warp

This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML, featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global network.
In this conversation, three guests from the network explore the rapid digitisation of public and judicial services around the world:
Courts in LatAm countries are using ChatGPT to power through the case backlog. Maria Pilar Llorens explains that speed is not a virtue in judicial settings
Kenya has adopted algorithmic proxy means-testing for healthcare — Gabriel Geiger & Purity Mukami reverse-engineered it to reveal its inequities
Digitised public services kind of have a formula now: Divij Joshi’s work takes an aerial view of digitised payments, IDs, and consolidated data sets that govern the efficiency playbook
Further reading & resources:
Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights Courts — Maria Pilar Llorens
Hiding Behind AI — Gabriel & Purity’s report on the new Kenyan healthcare system
Suspicion Machines — Gabriel Geiger et al, Lighthouse Reports March 2023
How an algorithm denied food to thousands of poor in India’s Telangana — Divij Joshi, Tapasya, Kumar Sambhav, Al Jazeera January 2024
AI governance in India – law, policy and political economy — Divij Joshi, 2024
Use of Entity Resolution in India: Shining a light on how new forms of automation can deny people access to welfare — Amnesty International 2024
Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.
Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

Klaudia Jaźwińska, Aliya Bhatia, and Yanick Kemayou come together to answer: What happens when a small collection of AI companies start colonising the truth?
More like this: The Toxic Relationship Between AI & Journalism w/ Nic Dawes

This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML, featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global network.
In this conversation, three guests from the network share all the ways in which AI is shaping our relationship with news, language, and learning:
People are increasingly using AI for search and to get their news; but Klaudia Jaźwińska’s research finds that chatbots have a huge citation problem
Many LLMs claim to be ‘multi-lingual’ — but also only tested in US English? Aliya Bhatia explains that porting outputs from English into all other languages in not gonna cut it
Higher education in Africa is completely disconnected from local knowledge, which is why Yanick Kemayou founded Kabakoo: an alternative learning platform that leverages and preserves local knowledge with the use of technology, and without exploitation
As Yancik says in this episode, “openness without governance is extraction with extra steps”.
Further reading & resources:
AI Search has a Citation Problem — Klaudia Jaźwińska & Aisvarya Chandrasekar
Lost in Translation: Large Language Models in Non-English Content Analysis — Gabriel Nicholas, Aliya Bhatia
More on Kabakoo Academies, founded by Yanick Kemayou
The SPUR Coalition — a UK org seeking to create standards and infrastructure for AI companies and news publishers to do business
The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World — by Pratik Joshi et al, 2020
The #BenderRule: On Naming the Languages We Study and Why It Matters — Emily Bender, 2019
The silicon gaze: A typology of biases and inequality in LLMs through the lens of place — Francisco W. Kerche et al, 2026
Bamako AI Festival
Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.
Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

How do we stand up against the human rights violations that exist in the gruesome relationship between the business of AI and war?
More like this: Computer Says Kill: The AI Safety Circus w/ Heidy Khlaaf

In our final installment of Computer Says Kill, Matt Mahmoudi returns, this time with Marwa Fatafta, to share the why and how of their recent joint statement on AI in warfare. The calls on AI companies to stop selling their products for use in military contexts, and for governments to cease buying them. The asks are simple while the execution is complex: what is the historical context of this fight and how long will it take to achieve some level of justice?
Further reading & resources:
Read the joint statement on Access Now and share across your networks
Microsoft: it’s time to come clean about your ties to the Israeli military — Access Now
A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians — The Guardian, 2025
AI for War: Big Tech Empowering Israel’s Crimes and Occupation — Al Shabaka, 2025
On Violence by Hanna Arendt
Anthropic announces 'Claude Corps' to teach nonprofits to use AI more effectively — The Independent, June 2026
Artificial Genocidal Intelligence: how Israel is automating human rights abuses and war crimes — Access Now, 2024

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.
Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

The AI industry loves to talk about safety, but their version of safety is putting us at risk.

More like this: The Palestine Laboratory w/ Antony Loewenstein
For our second to last series episode of Computer Says Kill, we’re joined by Heidy Khlaaf, a global expert in designing safe critical systems for high-risk infrastructures such as energy grids, nuclear power plants, and weaponry. Heidy outlines how the AI industry is working to redefine and shrink this essential, established field of expertise. By parading around sham “safety benchmarks”, this circus of an industry is marketing statistics that literally amount nothing at best, and proof that today’s LLMs aren’t safe at all, at worst. We explore the centuries of precedent and practice established in the safety field and examine how today’s AI safety “experts” are eroding this work to rush the incorporation of shoddy tech into the lucrative nooks and crannies of our militaries, economies, and physical infrastructure.
Further reading & resources:
Safety Co-Option and Compromised National Security: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Weakened AI Risk Thresholds — Heidy Khlaaf & Sarah Myers West, 2025
Social Benefit versus Technological Risk: What is our society willing to pay for safety? — Chauncey Starr, 1969
Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza. — WaPo December 2024
Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.
Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout