Feminist Actors Navigating AI

General discourse about AI tends toward a techno-utopia. However, feminist actors such as activists, researchers, practitioners, and educators are faced with the challenge of simultaneously understanding this complicated technology, identifying continuous lapses and violations, countering them, and developing pathways for meaningfully harnessing this technology for communal good.
Against these terrains, this research and learning report was prepared in the process of feminist engagements with GenAI while building feminist criticality around AI by converging personal navigations and capacity building. The study follows twenty feminist actors from Nepal through a pre-workshop survey, a three-day workshop on feminist critical AI literacy, and three weeks of using AI, reflecting on AI use, and scrutinizing it.

The current push for generative AI stands on a market-led, extractive, exploitative foundation marred by epistemic hierarchies. Since its very conception, generative AI has been designed through gender agnostic lenses, built on infrastructure against community interests, trained on materials without due consent by creators, and used to propagate and amplify harms against marginalized communities.