Creative data justice: a decolonial and indigenous framework to assess creativity and artificial intelligence

In the last decade, the Global South has emerged as a significant player in the data economy due to their majority user base, and studying its role is crucial to comprehend the future of AI. As societies grapple with the implications of AI on creative life, there is an opportunity to reevaluate the creative contributions of Global South cultures, ensuring they are acknowledged and foregrounded in the evolving landscape of human and machine creativity. This paper calls for reimagining and restructuring creative value with the emergence of AI enabled technologies by broadening who and what counts as creative in this data-driven era. To democratize creativity, a decolonial and indigenous framework of cross-cultural creative value is needed which critically intersects and examines the relations between creative labor, rights, and learning. The study of the Global South’s data economies is important not only to harness its potential but also to address the cross-cultural ethics of building Creative AI tools with data from their underrepresented communities. At its core, the creative data justice framework emphasizes the need to challenge the existing power imbalances in global data governance. This paper proposes that fair creative value can be achieved by drawing inspiration from indigenous systems of care as a counterforce to neoliberal values of efficiency and utility. This framework will help scholars, policymakers and designers in their inclusive approaches to creativity in the age of AI.