Alexia Achilleos

The AI Colonialism Board Game [Cyprus]

Images: Dall-e 2-generated images prompted by the artist; Catherine Breslin / Better Images of AI / Silicon Closeup / CC-BY 4.0.

Cyprus is under AI colonialism’s occupation. A few Western AI companies have centralised all power in their hands and control the global AI infrastructure, pushing their own values and worldviews as universal, without taking into consideration the rich diversity of experiences of communities around the world. They also exploit the global population and the natural environment for their own profit, from mining raw materials in ex-colonies, used to build hardware that run their technologies, to extracting internet users’ data to train AI models.

In this game, the players have to collectively fight against AI colonialism by collaboratively collecting all Fragments of Decolonial AI that have been scattered across the island, to create speculative Cypriot AI systems, while avoiding having their data scraped by the Web Scraper. To reach the Fragments, players move along the game board, following the instructions on the player cards. The cards will prompt collective reflection on how AI colonialism impacts the local Cypriot communities and investigate what kinds of power asymmetries are at play — both on a global level, but also within Cypriot society. Not everyone will be impacted by AI the same way.