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ai and the Middle East, Confronting the Emotional Biases of Techno-Orientalism: Decolonizing AI’s Affective Gaze through Middle Eastern Lenses

As Kate Crawford powerfully articulated in the “Atlas of AI,” the design and deployment of artificial intelligence systems are deeply embedded with power relations, politics, and cultural hegemonies that demand interrogation. Her critique takes on heightened urgency when applied to the rapidly advancing field of affective computing and emotion AI – technologies that seek to systematize the recognition, interpretation and simulation of human emotional states. We must ask: Whose epistemologies and constructions of emotion are centered in these systems’ development? What are the implications of AI’s affective gaze being primarily filtered through Western cultural lenses?

From Middle Eastern and Middle Eastern studies perspectives, the predominant affective computing research appears to be firmly rooted in Western positivist frameworks that risk universalizing, essentializing and decontextualizing the study of emotion. This epistemological centering exposes the field’s disquieting resonances with the historic fallacies of orientalist knowledge production that exoticized and rendered monolithic the “Eastern other.” To develop an ethical, pluralistic affective AI ecology, we must confront this techno-orientalism and integrate insights that can decolonize and expand our understanding of affect.

Poetic, artistic and philosophical traditions across the Middle East offer crucial epistemic interventions by grappling with emotion’s transcendent, inexpressible complexities. The Sufi writings of thinkers like Ibn Arabi and Rumi intimate affect as a liminal realm of spiritual unfolding that exceeds categorical constraints. Arabic literary concepts of “haal” – the fleeting ephemeral state – subvert the stasis presumed in mapping universal emotions. From this lens, solely prioritizing facial action coding methods risks rendering affective AI rudimentary and reductive.

These traditions illuminate how emotion is inexorably embedded in cultural metaphors, language, embodied hermeneutics, and lived experiences. Diverse Islamic and Judaic intellectual discourses – from Al-Ghazali to Maimonides – provide alternative holistic frameworks for conceptualizing emotion’s role in cultivating human virtues like self-mastery, awareness and empathy. Integrating such plural knowledge systems is vital for developing affective AI that moves beyond mere detection towards nurturing emotional integrity and societal wellbeing.

However, proponents of affective computing must reckon with how region’s heterogenous cultural norms and power structures significantly impact attitudes towards emotional expression. Postcolonial and feminist critics crucially counter orientalizing rhetoric that essentializes emotion norms, highlighting diverse perspectives across the Middle East’s ethnic, religious and gender lines. The values of modesty, honor and emotional restraint in public spheres may fuel skepticism of technologies perceived as extractive or socially disruptive without nuanced, community-engaged implementation.

Oral traditions and literary canons further reveal emotion’s interdependence with semiotics, meaning-making and the sociopolitics of emotive performance across the region. Emotions are intricately woven into rituals of hospitality, grieving ceremonies and communal celebrations. Affective recognition that myopically isolates emotion as data points divorced from rich contexts risks perpetuating the colonial gaze’s violence of cultural translation and effacement.

As artificial emotional intelligence grows more pervasive, centering interdisciplinary collaboration with Middle Eastern scholars, creatives and practitioners is crucial for mitigating AI’s orientalist blindspots. A decolonial computing paradigm synthesizing plural epistemologies from the region could help interrogate the field’s normative assumptions and open new pathways. It may illuminate more holistic, socially-conscious affective AI aligned with the Middle East’s diverse understandings of that most fundamentally human experience – our emotions.

We must urgently ask: What violences and erasures might affective computing replicate if left unreflexively shaped by hegemonic Western techno-orientalist gazes alone? Integrating vital Middle Eastern perspectives can help cultivate a pluriversal, ethically-attuned affective AI that honors emotion’s transcendent complexities.


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (10. Juni 2024). ai and the Middle East, Confronting the Emotional Biases of Techno-Orientalism: Decolonizing AI’s Affective Gaze through Middle Eastern Lenses. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 26. März 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/13jr5


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