By Ameya Nagarajan, Debora Prado, and Hija Kamran

This article is part of the series “Don’t ask AI, ask a peer,” a collaboration between Global Voices, the Association for Progressive Communication (APC), and GenderIT. The series aims to re-emphasise the importance of knowledge sharing among people, as has been done for decades. You can follow the series on APC.org, GenderIT.org, and globalvoices.org.

This editorial was co-written by three editors, representing three different voices and writing styles, which we have not edited. It only went through a copy-editing process for punctuation and spelling corrections. This is a deliberate decision to highlight human creativity and diversity, which is the core idea of this series.

As editors of communication platforms dedicated to safeguarding human rights and amplifying marginalised voices and narratives, we have faced a dilemma in recent years: how to deal with the growing volume of content generated by large learning models, commonly referred to as artificial intelligence, or AI, for short.

On the one hand, the advance of these technologies in a highly extractive corporate model poses many risks and negative impacts — from their calamitous environmental impact to exploitation of land and resources to their use for surveillance and war, and many other violations of human rights. On the other hand, we know that tools like these can be a concrete and accessible alternative, for example, for authors from the Global South who make the generous effort of writing in non-native languages, such as English or Spanish. We are also aware that people with disabilities use AI as an assistive tool in their work.

In an effort to understand contradictions such as these and to navigate the various conversations and confusions while continuing to provide a space for our writers and readers, APC and its groundbreaking project GenderIT.org drew up a policy last year, inspired by and in consultation with Global Voices, which had also just released its own policy. In both cases, the organisations explored important questions around human voice, agency, creativity and labour, and sought a way to value this creativity while ensuring this was underpinned by relationships based on trust and transparency — without resorting to a binary approach or attempting to impose bans. Keeping this in mind, in these policies, we say:

Global Voices is proud to publish writing, translation, and illustrations created by people, for people, and we expect our contributors to uphold that standard.

As a diverse and grounded community, APC values content that has been produced as the result of a creative human process, which is nurtured by the lived experiences, human interactions, expertise and diversity of the people and organisations that make up the network.

As we came together to tackle this shared challenge, an idea emerged: What if we went a step further? What if, as well as affirming the value of human diversity and creativity, we demonstrated it in practice? And so the idea for a series was born: Don’t ask AI, ask a peer — a collaboration between Global Voices and APC’s platforms APC.org and GenderIT.org.

The series aims to re-emphasise the importance of knowledge sharing among people, as has been done for decades: communal exchange of information and expertise based on years of lived experiences, informed by local realities, and motivated by the need to feel connected with one another. With the introduction of generative AI, this connection has increasingly been lost, as people have turned to AI-based tools for answers instead of asking elders, family, friends, coworkers and community members.

This series is aimed at addressing the very human need to feel connected, to continue to be part of a community, and to feel a sense of belonging. During our brainstorming sessions, we realised that it is important to bring back this communal form of knowledge sharing, where every person perceives the “ask” in their own way and offers a response the way they feel is important. This became our anchor to highlight the unique voice each of us carries — something that AI, with its monotonous tone, cannot replicate.

So for this series, we initially developed two basic questions in the same way that one might ask AI:

• Why is it vital to value human creativity and connection in the age of AI?
• What could be done to create a human rights approach to AI?

But here, these questions will be answered by authors and illustrators from different countries and with different backgrounds, each taking a distinct path. This content will be edited and translated by people. It will be imbued with human emotions, reflections and contradictions. The work will be remunerated, and the acknowledgments clear. Instead of pre-programmed responses generated by opaque algorithms designed to please users and hold their attention, different perspectives and thought-provoking ideas could spark conversations. And human brains will each find their unique way to consider these questions.

As peers, we editors have shared a common vision throughout the process of putting together this series being launched today. We have also brought different perspectives to the table, weaving them together into a patchwork quilt, much like this editorial, which was also written collaboratively. By sharing the series and its intentions now, we hope to hear from our community, reflect together, embrace dissent, identify areas of consensus, and perhaps co-create emerging questions for future rounds.

Today, we extend an invitation to you to join us. Ask your peers, read what your peers have to say, share their content, and develop your own ideas and creations to be shared — alone or in collaboration with others. By doing things differently, we can realise that no future is inevitable, and no technology is compulsory or ubiquitous. Alternative ways of doing things have always existed and always will.

You can follow the series throughout April on APC.org, GenderIT.org and globalvoices.org. If you’d like to receive updates on this series and more content from the organisations via email, subscribe to APC’s newsletter here and Global Voices’ newsletter here.

Ameya Nagarajan (she/her) is the managing editor for the Global Voices newsroom and the editor for Advox.

Débora Prado (she/her) is the lead editor of APC.org and a journalist with a background in strategic communications, feminism and human rights.

Hija Kamran (she/her) is the lead editor of GenderIT.org and an advocacy strategist within APC’s Women’s Rights Programme.

The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) is a membership-based network of organisations and activists. APC.org is our main website, featuring all our news, updates, blogs, columns, and publications, with a special focus on how the internet and ICTs can be shaped for social, gender, and environmental justice.

GenderIT.org is a feminist publication, hosted by APC’s Women’s Rights Programme, that offers intersectional feminist reflections and analysis on topics at the intersection of gender, sexuality and technology.

Global Voices is an international, multilingual community of writers, translators, and human rights activists. Together, we leverage the power of the internet to tell stories that build understanding across borders.