AI & Colonial Logic: Christian “ZacaTechO” Ortiz & Thema Monroe-White

Part of SAND’s The Great AI Unraveling Series

Artificial intelligence is often framed as a leap forward, a technical revolution, or an inevitable stage in human progress. But what if AI is also asking us to confront something older: the colonial logic embedded in how we define intelligence, progress, neutrality, knowledge, and the human itself?

This conversation brought together voices working across technology, culture, race, power, and society to examine what AI reveals about the systems that built it. Rather than treating bias as a technical glitch, this conversation asks what must be unlearned at the level of worldview, institution, data, design, and collective imagination.

Facilitated by Christian “ZacaTechO” Ortiz, this dialogue explored AI through a decolonial lens asking necessary questions: Whose knowledge is extracted? Whose futures are optimized away? Whose bodies are surveilled? Whose intelligence is dismissed? And what can liberated knowledge make possible beyond colonial technology?

This is not a conversation about making machines more ethical within the same old systems. It is an invitation to question the systems themselves, and to imagine intelligence beyond extraction, domination, and control.

Topics

00:00 Welcome, and ZacaTechO

00:04 Why researchers are trained to disconnect

00:09 Red teaming, and what it misses

00:12 John is the doctor, Juan is the patient

00:18 Christian's first encounter with ChatGPT

00:21 How bias became normal

00:26 Justice AI as a model of refusal

00:29 Breaking a language model in the classroom

00:32 One model to rule them all, and the logic of eugenics

00:35 Galton, Namibia, and the through line

00:39 What do we mean by intelligence?

00:41 Emancipatory data science, and where to begin

Guests

Christian ZacaTechO Ortiz is an Afro-Indigenous decolonial social scientist and technologist. He is the founder of Justice AI GPT and author of the Decolonial Intelligence Algorithmic Framework. He studies how colonial systems still shape law, education, entertainment, and our bodies. The name ZacaTechO came from his father, after the family's origins in Zacatecas.

justiceaigpt.ca

LinkedIn

Academia.edu

Profiled in Forbes, September 2025

Substack

Dr. Thema Monroe-White is Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. Her work spans bias mitigation in AI, critical computational methods, and emancipatory data science. She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy from Georgia Tech, and master's and bachelor's degrees from Howard University. She is an advisory board member and fellow of the Institute in Critical Quantitative and Mixed Methodologies.

Faculty profile, George Mason University

Research profile

The research discussed

Laissez-Faire Harms: Algorithmic Biases in Generative Language Models — Shieh, Vassel, Sugimoto & Monroe-White. The open-ended prompting study described in the episode, the one where John is the doctor and Juan is the patient.

Emancipatory Data Science: A Liberatory Framework for Mitigating Data Harms and Fostering Social Transformation — Monroe-White's framework for using computation to diagnose rather than to solve.

Dismantling Eugenics Logics in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence — the through line from Galton to contemporary machine learning.

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? — Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major & Shmitchell, 2021.

Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models — Wei et al., Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2022.

Scholars named in the conversation

Timnit Gebru — founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute

Joy Buolamwini — founder of the Algorithmic Justice League

Ruha Benjamin — author of Race After Technology

Safiya Noble — author of Algorithms of Oppression

Meredith Broussard — author of More Than a Glitch

Emily Bender