AI everywhere: Integration or digital colonialism?

The contemporary digital landscape is undergoing a seismic shift.

Unnecessary features such as automatic translation of reels, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated summaries of personal messages, and predictive texts that finish our sentences are being woven into the fabric of our daily lives.

This aggressive push of technology is not new. Such AI integration mirrors historical patterns of economic expansion and cultural erasure.

This creates a core dilemma: Is this progress or a new era of digital colonialism?

The push for AI is a replica of the mid-20th-century strategy of induced demand. 

In economics, this happens when a producer increases the supply of a product to the point where it alters consumer behaviour, creating a “need” where none previously existed.

One such example is the introduction of a smart fridge. 

A refrigerator’s major job is to stay cold. Adding a Wi-Fi connected touch screens to track the expiration date of eggs is not a dire need. It is rather a solution looking for a problem.

Manufacturers deliberately made dumb appliances harder to find or purposefully omitted features from them to create a technological lock-in. Consumers don’t buy those because they need such smart appliances but because the entire system was being designed to require that central hub.

By marketing smart appliances as a symbol of modern sophistication, they manufactured a necessity.

Today, AI giants (primarily based in the Global North) are following the same blueprint. By forcefully integrating AI into an everyday usage platform, they make sure that every interaction becomes a data point.

Having saturated the market with hardware and cloud storage, they must now justify the astronomical valuations of generative AI. 

By forcing AI into social media interfaces, they ensure that every user interaction becomes a data point, fuelling the very engines they seek to monetize.

This aggressive integration of AI transcends mere market strategy. It highlights a structural shift toward algorithmic extractivism, where technological dependency becomes a tool for geopolitical dominance.

Scholars and critics argue that this phenomenon replicates the older patterns of economic dependency raising concerns about data extraction, cultural dominance, and the erosion of digital sovereignty in the Global South.

The debate stems from dependency theory, a framework that suggests how resources historically flow from poorer “peripheral” nations to wealthier “core” states, underpinning global inequity.

This suggests that advanced economies are once again benefitting disproportionately, but this time from data, labour, and attention.

One such evident example is AI giant OpenAI. While the West interacts with a magical and clean interface of ChatGPT, the labour that makes it safe is outsourced to the Global South. 

As reported by The Guardian, OpenAI used workers in Kenya (via the firm Sama) to label thousands of passages of graphic, traumatic content for less than $2 per hour.

This creates a massive value gap i.e., the intellectual property stays in Silicon Valley, while the psychological and physical labour is offloaded to developing nations.

History shows that technological gifts often come with strings attached. For instance, during the colonial era, the British built extensive railway networks in the subcontinent. 

While framed as a civilizing era, the major purpose was the efficient extraction of raw materials and the rapid movement of troops to suppress local dissent.

Similarly, the free AI tools provided today are the digital railways of the 21st century. They facilitate the extraction of our most valuable raw material i.e., human attention and data.

Most LLMs are trained with English-centric data. When Meta applies its moderation algorithms worldwide, they often spectacularly fail.

According to a discussion paper published by the CARR Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, Meta-owned Facebook's AI appeared to have incorrectly labeled "terrorist content" in non-violent Arabic content.

Researchers also found that Google’s Perspective API applied American norms to local slang.

For instance, while the term "dawg" is casual in the U.S., it is highly disrespectful in Swahili. Similarly, the term “fatness,” which means wealth, beauty, and fertility in Africa, was flagged by AI as toxic body shaming.

This forces Global South to adopt a Western semantic logic just to exist on these platforms.

Hence, the aggressive integration of AI is not merely a natural evolution, it is a calculated economic maneuver. This creates a closed loop: dependency is induced, authenticity is degraded and solutions are monetized.