Who gets to say what?
Cultural appropriation in the age of AI. Let's get into it.
You may have seen Jarren, from @bushlegend.offical, pop up on your socials lately. He’s a charismatic Indigenous Australian wildlife warrior who gets up close and personal with all sorts of fascinating animals. He’s also entirely made up; an AI-generated avatar created by Keagan Mason, a white South African man living in New Zealand.
After being ‘outed’ on TikTok and in the media, Mason’s content has received blowback online, with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people calling it out as ‘digital blackface’ or ‘black cladding’, a term used recently by Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney, which refers to “unfair arrangements where the benefits are not flowing to First Nations people.”
In response, Mason made a vague video mildly acknowledging the controversy, saying (via his Indigenous alter ego's chipper voice), “I’m not here to represent any culture or group. This channel is simply about animal stories.” Coming out of the charismatic Jarren’s mouth, it’s almost believable. Until you scroll a bit further down the page and find that Mason actually started out creating irreverent AI content of Maori people. He’s created white guys too—but just compare the likes.
In the very near future (if not now) it will be almost impossible to tell if what you’re seeing is real, or just really convincing storytelling. This all seems very new and scary. But it’s not new at all.
Storytellers have been ‘appropriating’ other people’s lives for, literally, ever. And for at least the last century, if not longer, most thoughtful writers, artists, musicians and creators have been asking themselves the hard questions. What stories are mine to tell? What characters can I bring to life in fiction without appropriating another’s identity? Can atheists write about religion? Can sighted people write from the perspective of a blind protagonist? Must black writers only write about black people? Or should we all just stick to the old adage of ‘write what you know?’ And goes it matter more if there is financial gain to be made?
Not if we value great stories.
It’s true that conjuring characters from within a category that’s not your own requires a lot of care and research to be done well, but the best artists are often great ventriloquists. Did Dolly Parton work 9 to 5? But some artists are more cautious than others. American Novelist Jonathan Franzen (in)famously said that he has to have experience of loving a category of person before he can write about them. “I don’t have very many black friends. I have never been in love with a black woman. I feel like if I had, I might dare.”
So what’s the difference between Jarren, the bush legend, and say, Alex Cross, the African-American detective penned by James Patterson? Context, of course. Despite the ‘AI disclaimer’ on the bush legend’s social pages, this creator is banking on most of his audience having no clue that the content is fake. But more than that, his ‘character’ has no mob, no history, no family—not one skerrick of cultural context. And it’s because of this—not the fact that it’s made with AI—that the content is a flop.
So if you ever find yourself nervously wondering "am I allowed to say/write/create that?" Pakistani and British novelist Kamila Shamsie said it best: “don’t set boundaries around your imagination. But don’t be lazy or presumptuous in your writing either. Not for reasons of “political correctness”, but for reasons of good fiction.”
* Photo by Taylor Heery on Unsplash
