AI authoritarianism: towards an analytical framework

Dekeyser, Thomas, Lynch, Casey R. and Maalsen, Sophia (2025) AI authoritarianism: towards an analytical framework. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, [e70048]. (doi:10.1111/tran.70048).

Record type: Article

Abstract

This intervention offers a call for investigating the deepening alignment of artificial intelligence and authoritarian politics. The paper highlights three key features of AI that inflect the workings and logics of authoritarianism: (selective) inhumanisation, the cult of intelligence and scaling. We argue that AI, through these features, is not simply extending, but actively modulating, key dynamics of authoritarianism. To account for this, we propose a flexible analytical framework designed to grapple with the rapidly changing materialisations of the confluence of AI and authoritarianism and suggest focusing on how what we call ‘authoritarian tendencies’ are introduced on the level of the techno-material, the ideological and the everyday. The framework recognises that both AI and authoritarianism are relational practices and thus requires geographers to trace these relations across multiple sites and actors while being attentive to the ways AI and authoritarianism mutually shape one another in ever-shifting ways.

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