{"id":32265,"date":"2026-05-19T12:19:28","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T15:19:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/?p=32265"},"modified":"2026-05-19T12:19:32","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T15:19:32","slug":"necro-logos-and-bio-poiesis-the-algorithmic-administration-of-the-living","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/necro-logos-and-bio-poiesis-the-algorithmic-administration-of-the-living\/","title":{"rendered":"Necro-logos and Bio-poiesis: The Algorithmic Administration of the Living"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>By: Araceli Ram\u00edrez<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><br \/>Abstract<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Generative AI is no longer \u201cjust another tool\u201d: it is increasingly becoming a cultural infrastructure for the production of language. It can generate coherent and functional discourse, yes, but in doing so it displaces central elements of the social life of language: conflict, opacity, territory, the body, and historicity. In dialogue with \u00c9ric Sadin, this article proposes the term <em>necro-logos<\/em> to describe this \u201cdead language\u201d: a spectral linguistic economy whose guiding principle is optimization (fluency, acceptability, compatibility with dominant norms) and whose cultural effect is to foreclose the unexpected (Sadin, 2024; Sadin, 2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As a counterpoint, I propose <em>bio-poiesis<\/em>: situated, embodied, and relational creation, which feminisms and Southern epistemologies uphold as a political practice of resistance and world-making (D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020; Ricaurte, 2019). Focusing on Paraguay and Latin America, I argue that generative AI intensifies a double colonization: that of data (epistemic extractivism) and that of imagination (cultural homogenization), with glottopolitical effects on local languages and registers, and differentiated impacts shaped by gender and structural inequality (Ricaurte, 2019). Drawing on regional intervention initiatives (such as EDIA\/V\u00eda Libre and Latam-GPT), I conclude by proposing lines of action grounded in digital rights: feminist data governance, situated bias auditing, critical literacy, and technology design oriented toward care (Costanza-Chock, 2020; D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Keywords:<\/strong> generative AI; language; algorithmic glottopolitics; data feminism; Global South; digital rights; creativity; data sovereignty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a>When Prediction Becomes Culture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a scene that repeats itself, with only minor variations, in offices, classrooms, and newsrooms across the region. Someone opens a chat window, types two lines (\u201cwrite me a formal statement,\u201d \u201cdraft an executive summary,\u201d \u201cput together a press text\u201d), and receives a polished, courteous, almost impeccable result. The feeling is ambivalent: relief at the speed and, at the same time, a difficult-to-name unease. Not because the text is bad, but because the text sounds as if it came from nowhere. It is language without temperature, without friction, without traces. A \u201ccorrect\u201d language that seems to float.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That floating quality is not merely an aesthetic detail. At the heart of generative AI lies an operation that has become so ordinary it is nearly invisible: turning language into a problem of prediction. Where language was once an event (saying something at a particular moment, with a body, with risk), it is now administered as probability: which word follows which, which phrase \u201cworks,\u201d which tone \u201cfits,\u201d which form minimizes conflict and maximizes acceptability. The result is a kind of airport prose: useful, universal, without territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u00c9ric Sadin has described this shift as part of a broader mutation: the transition toward an algorithmic administration of existence, in which life itself is organized through technical layers that do not merely assist, but decide, orient, and normalize (Sadin, 2020, 2023). In this reading, generative AI is not a friendly piece of software: it is a cultural technology that reconfigures language as a manageable resource. And if language becomes manageable, then creativity does too; and if creativity becomes manageable, culture enters a new regime of governance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This article begins from a strong hypothesis: generative AI is producing an epochal shift in the cultural ecology of language. Not only through the automation of texts, but because it installs prediction as a criterion of expressive legitimacy. What is written (and how it is written) increasingly comes to be evaluated, suggested, corrected, or rewritten by machines trained on vast datasets. In this way, the statistical average of the past is transformed into the norm of the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>From Paraguay and the Global South, this transformation does not arrive on neutral ground. It arrives in societies marked by structural inequalities, colonial histories, linguistic tensions, and feminist and dissident struggles that have made language itself a practice of rupture. For this reason, rather than asking whether AI \u201cis creative,\u201d the more important question is: what kind of creativity becomes dominant when language becomes prediction? What happens to situated narratives\u2014those emerging from the margins, from counter-hegemonic spaces, from social conflict\u2014when the cultural standard is defined through optimization?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To name this regime, I propose <em>necro-logos<\/em>: a dead language in the political sense of the term. Not because it fails to produce sentences, but because it reduces language to performance: fluency, coherence, plausibility, usefulness. Against this, I propose <em>bio-poiesis<\/em>: living creation as a situated, feminist, and decolonial practice aimed at sustaining the power of the unexpected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A situated philosophical critique<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>In this article, I adopt a critical theory of technology approach grounded in digital rights and cultural studies of language. Methodologically, I combine:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>1. Conceptual analysis (necro-logos, bio-poiesis, algorithmic glottopolitics), in central dialogue with Sadin and with feminist and decolonial contributions (Haraway, 1988; D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020; Ricaurte, 2019; Costanza-Chock, 2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>2. A cultural sociology reading of generative AI as an infrastructure for symbolic production, paying attention to the political economy of data and platforms (Zuboff, 2019; Crawford, 2021).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>3. Regional case studies as intervention practices: EDIA (V\u00eda Libre) and Latam-GPT, understood not as \u201ctechnical solutions\u201d but as disputes over data governance, language, and technological sovereignty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My objective is not to offer a \u201ctechnical evaluation\u201d of these language models, but to contest the cultural and political meaning of generative AI from the Global South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Spectral life: the mutation of language into a commodity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Sadin describes a present in which the digital ceases to be an external tool and instead operates as a layer that reorganizes experience: a \u201cspectral life\u201d in which technical mediation produces a world of disembodied presences, decisions without deliberation, and actions without a fully accountable subject (Sadin, 2023). The spectral does not mean \u201cfalse,\u201d but disembodied: a form of presence that operates without the weight of the body, time, and conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Generative AI intensifies this spectrality because it touches the raw material of cultural life: language. If language is the place where a community argues, imagines, fights, agrees, remembers, and projects itself, then turning it into an optimized output is not a minor shift. It is a reconfiguration of culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the philosophical tradition, language is not merely a vehicle. It is a site of struggle over meaning. By contrast, the generative model operates as a machine of stabilization: it produces \u201ccorrect,\u201d predictable phrases, in a register that tends toward conciliation and neutrality. In this gesture, there is a politics of language: less conflict, less singularity, more compatibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here emerges the first thesis of the article:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Thesis 1.<\/strong> Generative AI introduces a cultural economy of the word based on optimization, in which the criterion of \u201cgood language\u201d shifts toward fluency and acceptability, deactivating the conflictual and situated dimension of meaning (Sadin, 2023).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This does not mean that all generated text is \u201cbad.\u201d It means that the cultural regime being installed privileges a certain kind of language: language that does not unsettle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Necro-logos: dead language as a regime of prediction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>To say that language models \u201cpredict the next word\u201d often sounds like a popularized technical explanation, as if it were merely a mechanical detail. But within the framework of this article, that minimal operation\u2014prediction\u2014is not a neutral mechanism: it is a cultural ontology. Generative AI does not \u201cparticipate\u201d in language as an event; it treats it as a probabilistic space in which continuity matters more than rupture. And that priority is not only computational: it becomes a normative principle when these systems turn into everyday writing infrastructure in schools, media, companies, civil society organizations, and the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A language model is trained on large textual corpora produced under specific historical conditions: press archives, digitized books, forums, social media, websites, manuals, bureaucratic documents, etc. In that training process, language is reduced to a structure of statistical regularities: the model learns which sequences are frequent, which associations recur, which turns of phrase are \u201cexpected.\u201d The decisive point is that what we call the system\u2019s \u201coutput\u201d is the selection\u2014under different sampling and tuning techniques\u2014of what is most probable (or sufficiently probable) within that space (Bender et al., 2021). It does not produce what a subject \u201cmeans to say\u201d; it produces what fits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>From this perspective, the model is extraordinary at tasks that depend on continuity: summarizing, rewriting, standardizing, completing, homogenizing. But there, too, the core of its conservatism is revealed: its creativity is not historical rupture, but statistical recombination of what has already been said. In cultural terms, its power resembles a collage more than an eruption. It can mix styles, imitate voices, vary registers; but it does so within a governing criterion: maximizing plausibility within the universe it inherited. Its \u201coriginality\u201d is subordinated to verisimilitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The critique of \u201cstochastic parrots\u201d put it with brutal clarity: these models can produce convincing language without understanding, and that capacity for convincingness enables a recurring social error\u2014confusing fluency with truth, coherence with knowledge, and syntactic correctness with epistemic responsibility (Bender et al., 2021). However, for the argument of necro-logos, the problem does not end with epistemology (\u201cthey do not know what they are saying\u201d); it shifts toward the sociology of culture: what kind of culture emerges when the infrastructure of writing is organized around prediction?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Temporal asymmetry: the future as a derivation of the past<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a structural feature of generative AI that makes it ontologically conservative even when it presents itself as futuristic: it feeds on the past to produce the present. Training corpora are, by definition, already-produced archives; and although they may incorporate updates, there is always a temporal gap\u2014a \u201clayer of the past\u201d\u2014that operates as a condition of possibility for the output. Strictly speaking, the model does not \u201cimagine\u201d the future; it extrapolates it. This temporal asymmetry is not incidental: it has deep cultural implications, because it tends to make the past a silent arbiter of what can be said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In human language, meaning is not only continuity; it is also interruption. Social life produces neologisms, resignifications, resemanticized slurs, ironic turns, and tactical uses of speech to evade censorship or name the unsayable. Much political creativity\u2014and particularly feminist creativity\u2014consists in producing a break within the dominant dictionary: forcing language to accommodate new experiences, or historically denied ones. By contrast, when language is processed as a space of probability, rupture is reabsorbed as rarity, and rarity is penalized by the criterion of plausibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a form of closure of the future: not because the model cannot generate new phrases, but because its \u201cnovelty\u201d tends to remain compatible with the archive. A feminism that seeks anomaly as a horizon of possibility\u2014that is, a feminism understood as a practice of rupture\u2014appears as deviation. And deviation, within a regime of prediction, becomes statistically costly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Necro-logos transforms politics into style<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>If the first movement of necro-logos was ontological (prediction as a mode of being of language), the second is cultural (standardization as a mode of circulation). At this point, the second thesis of the article emerges:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Thesis 2.<\/strong> Generative AI transforms politics into style: by privileging fluency and acceptability, it rewrites social conflict as discursive neutrality and turns \u201creasonableness\u201d into a standardized format of enunciation, with effects of depoliticization and cultural homogenization (Sadin, 2023; D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This thesis does not claim that the model \u201ccensors\u201d political content. It claims something more subtle\u2014and perhaps more powerful: that the model modulates the way it becomes possible to speak politically. And form matters. Patriarchal violence, racism, extractivism, and inequality are not discussed in a manual-like tone. When they are truly confronted, they are addressed in language that unsettles, accuses, demands. If the dominant language becomes one that \u201cdoes not disturb,\u201d the public sphere becomes less capable of sustaining conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Feminisms know this problem well: accusations of being \u201cexaggerated,\u201d \u201cradical,\u201d or \u201caggressive\u201d have historically functioned as disciplinary technologies against voices that disrupt consensus. If generative AI reinforces a standard of \u201cmoderation\u201d as the superior form of writing, that standard can operate as a new layer of discipline: an aesthetic filter that is political.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>From the perspective of data feminism, neutrality is suspect because it often conceals hierarchies: the apparently objective \u201cdata\u201d reproduces the world as shaped by power relations. The same applies to style: the \u201cneutral\u201d register is often the register of dominant groups, elevated to the status of universal (D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020). And in terms of coloniality, regimes of data and knowledge tend to turn the Global North into the measure of legitimacy (Ricaurte, 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Regression to the mean: style as cultural discipline<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Deviation \u201ccosts\u201d because the regime of prediction rewards what is recognizable. In practice, this means that generative AI tends to push language toward a center of gravity: the middle register, the acceptable tone, the frictionless syntax. This tendency appears not only in content but also in form: predictable paragraph structures, \u201cclean\u201d transitions, conciliatory endings, rhetorical caution. The result is a regression to the mean that operates as cultural discipline: to write \u201cwell\u201d becomes to write \u201cas expected.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At this point, the question becomes sociological: if millions of people use these systems as writing prostheses, the issue is no longer what the model \u201ccan do,\u201d but what the model does to culture\u2014what styles it consolidates, which tones it turns into standards, which repertoires of enunciation it leaves out. If language is the material substrate of public life, then standardizing it is equivalent to intervening in the very infrastructure of deliberation, imagination, and social conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This dynamic aligns with Sadin\u2019s reading: when technology ceases to be an instrument and becomes an organizing layer, social life is reconfigured according to criteria of functionality and performance. \u201cAlgorithmic administration\u201d operates not only on explicit decisions; it operates on the conditions of what can be said, on the molds from which speaking and writing emerge (Sadin, 2020, 2023). In this framework, generative AI is not merely a writing tool: it is a technology that administers the form of language, pushing it toward predictability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Linguistic and cultural differences: not \u201cvarieties,\u201d but forms of life (and of struggle)<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>In contexts such as Paraguay, speaking of \u201clinguistic differences\u201d as if they were merely variations in register falls short. Languages and ways of speaking are not just systems of signs; they are forms of life, repertoires of relation, technologies of care, ways of surviving. And, above all, they are territories where it is contested who can speak, how they can speak, with what authority, and with what consequences. In this framework, the homogenizing effect of necro-logos is not an aesthetic problem: it is a problem of cultural justice and, ultimately, of digital rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Feminist and decolonial critique insists that there is no innocent linguistic neutrality. What is often presented as \u201cneutral Spanish,\u201d \u201cplain language,\u201d or a \u201cprofessional tone\u201d has historically functioned as a yardstick that rewards those who already speak from legitimized positions\u2014by class, formal education, geography, gender\u2014and penalizes those who produce meaning from the margins. In other words, the standard is not universal; it is hegemonic. For this reason, when generative AI pushes toward a middle register, it is not \u201cimproving\u201d language; it is reinforcing a cultural order that decides which voices sound serious and which sound \u201cimproper\u201d (D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020; Ricaurte, 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the terms of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, that universality often functions as a device of concealment: egalitarian words and ideologies that, in practice, make it possible to \u201csidestep\u201d rights and sustain colonial hierarchies (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This point becomes especially clear if we think of language as a situated practice, in Haraway\u2019s sense: all knowledge speaks from somewhere\u2014from a body, from a position, from a vulnerability, from a history. What presents itself as a view from nowhere is, often, the dominant point of view disguised as universality (Haraway, 1988). Generative AI, by producing a voice without a body or territory, tends to turn that illusion of universality into an expressive norm: a style without markers, without visible genealogy, without declared conflict. And that is precisely where its power lies: by not marking itself, it imposes itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Guaran\u00ed, jopara, and the \u201cright\u201d not to translate oneself<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>In Paraguay, Guaran\u00ed and jopara are not cultural ornament: they are languages of intimacy, community, humor, care, anger, and everyday connection. Translating them into standard Spanish is not neutral: it often entails changing the world they carry with them. Some things do not \u201ccarry over\u201d in the same way\u2014rhythms, forms of closeness, modes of naming, affective densities, gestures of irony or respect. When a model trained on large corpora in which Guaran\u00ed and jopara are underrepresented pushes toward neutral Spanish, it enacts a form of algorithmic glottopolitics: the situated appears as \u201cnoise,\u201d as exception, as error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But here the feminist turn is crucial: the issue is not only the language; it is who is required to translate themselves. Historically, self-translation has been a demand placed on those at the margins: women, Indigenous peoples, dissident groups, precarized communities. The center rarely translates itself. The center defines itself as \u201cthe norm.\u201d When generative AI normalizes a \u201cclean\u201d register, it intensifies that asymmetry: the margin once again bears the burden of adaptation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In terms of digital rights, this raises an uncomfortable question: what does \u201caccess\u201d to language technologies mean if that access requires giving up one\u2019s own way of speaking? Inclusion that comes at the cost of erasure is not inclusion\u2014it is assimilation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">LGBTQ+ languages and the violence of the standard<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>A similar dynamic occurs\u2014though in a different way\u2014with the languages and repertoires of LGBTQ+ communities. Across many Latin American contexts, sexual and gender dissidents have developed ways of speaking that are not merely identity markers: they are tactics of care, mutual recognition, and world-making. Inclusive language, community-specific turns of phrase, internal humor, resignifications (\u201cmarica,\u201d \u201ctrava,\u201d \u201cnon-binary,\u201d depending on context), and ways of naming affects and violences all function as tools for existing in societies that systematically deny those existences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When generative AI privileges \u201cwhat is acceptable,\u201d through both prediction and alignment, it tends to do two things at once: (1) render what was already marginal even more rare, and (2) rewrite it into a \u201ctolerant\u201d but depoliticized register. This gesture is subtle: the model may \u201caccept\u201d diversity in the abstract, yet produce a form of language in which difference appears as a topic, rather than as a way of life. In that operation, something essential is lost: the conflictual and situated character of these struggles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here the connection to the broader thesis becomes clear: necro-logos transforms politics into style. In the LGBTQ+ case, politics is not an opinion; it is a condition of existence. What is at stake is not whether the text sounds agreeable, but whether it can sustain the density of experiences shaped by violence, precarity, family expulsion, and institutional discrimination. A \u201csoftened\u201d language can become a form of erasure: it does not deny, but it neutralizes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>From the perspective of data feminism, this effect is not accidental: systems tend to reproduce inequality when \u201coptimization\u201d becomes the guiding objective. And in hegemonic cultures, optimization often means minimizing conflict. But for those at the margins, conflict is not a defect of language\u2014it is the form social truth takes when justice is absent (D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Coloniality and inequality: who is inside the archive and who is left out<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>From the Global South, moreover, marginality is not only about identity; it is geopolitical. The corpora that feed these models are shaped by historical inequalities in publishing, digitization, access to infrastructure, and linguistic prestige. Ricaurte frames this in terms of the coloniality of data: what is extracted and computed responds to power relations; the global archive is not neutral, but an unequal map of who was able to leave a trace and who was erased (Ricaurte, 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If what the model learns as \u201cprobable\u201d comes largely from hegemonic repertoires, then necro-logos tends to turn that hegemony into automatic \u201ccommon sense.\u201d And when that automation becomes embedded in institutions (education, the state, media), inequality becomes infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is why insisting on Guaran\u00ed, jopara, LGBTQ+ languages, and popular and community registers is not a merely culturalist gesture: it is a struggle over the right to produce meaning from the margins, without having to constantly translate into the language of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The homogenization produced by necro-logos does not affect \u201ceveryone equally.\u201d It operates as a machine that favors those who already write from within the standard and demands that those at the margins adapt. Here, the question of language becomes a question of justice: who can speak without translation? Who can make mistakes? Who can sustain conflict without being expelled from what counts as \u201creasonable\u201d? In the next section, this discussion leads into bio-poiesis: situated creation as resistance, where error is not failure but a method for opening up the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Bio-poiesis and resistance: reopening language to the living<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>If necro-logos describes a regime in which prediction becomes cultural norm, bio-poiesis names the inverse operation: making language into an event. This is not about denying the technical power of generative AI, nor about embracing a nostalgia for a \u201cpure\u201d form of writing prior to the digital. It is about recovering something that the optimization regime tends to displace: language as a situated practice that produces worlds, not only texts; as a space where collective agency is at stake; as a zone of friction where bodies, differences, and conflicts become sayable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bio-poiesis, then, is not an \u201calternative style\u201d: it is a politics of meaning. And in the Global South, where technological infrastructure is often external and relations of extraction are historical, that politics becomes a rights-based agenda: defending material, cultural, and legal conditions that allow communities to name themselves without mandatory translation, to imagine without assimilation, and to dispute norms without being expelled from the public sphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a>The power of error: from \u201cfailure\u201d to method<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Necro-logos penalizes error because the improbable is costly. But for feminisms (and for many marginalized cultural practices), error is not an accident: it is a method. A \u201cglitch in the matrix\u201d does not mean incoherence, but a creative interruption of the norm. Where the model seeks the most probable, feminist writing insists on the possible: it invents words, forces pronouns, mixes languages, takes risks with metaphor, and sustains conflict when the grammar of consensus becomes a form of violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The history of feminist and dissident languages is made of productive errors: reappropriations, resignifications, syntactic torsions, forms of speech that emerge to survive and to build community. This work is simultaneously cultural and political: it constructs meanings that were not available in the dominant dictionary. For this reason, when generative AI becomes writing infrastructure, the challenge is not simply to \u201cuse the tool correctly,\u201d but to avoid losing the power of deviation that makes it possible to open up the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here it is useful to recover a central insight from data feminism: systems presented as neutral tend to consolidate inequalities unless they are deliberately designed for justice (D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020). Translated into language: if the default criterion is optimizing for acceptability, the result is prose that may look \u201cbetter,\u201d but is often better for the existing order. Bio-poiesis proposes the opposite: that the quality of language should also be measured by its capacity to make room for erased experiences and to sustain disputes over meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a>Example 1: writing against the average<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>In practical terms, bio-poiesis can operate as a writing ethic that recognizes the temptation of the \u201cperfect\u201d text and deliberately resists it. Where optimized output offers a flawless paragraph, situated writing allows for density: local turns of phrase, untranslatable words without immediate gloss, community in-jokes, sentences that unsettle because they name violence without softening it. This is not romanticism: it is cultural politics. It means not delegating the form of the sayable to a standard trained on hegemonic archives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Situated knowledge vs. the view from nowhere: false objectivity as style<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>In necro-logos, the \u201cunmarked\u201d voice is imposed as an ideal: a text that sounds universal. But Haraway showed long ago that universality is often a trick: what presents itself as a \u201cview from nowhere\u201d is usually the dominant standpoint masking its own situatedness (Haraway, 1988). Bio-poiesis takes this critique and radicalizes it for the context of generative AI: the problem is not that the machine lacks a body; it is that its lack of a body is used as authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Generative AI can sound objective because it writes with distance, with a \u201cbalanced\u201d tone, with rhetorical caution. But that balance is an aesthetic produced by industrial incentives and by an alignment economy. In other words, supposed objectivity is a style. And when style becomes authority, politics becomes administration: deliberation is replaced by plausibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>D\u2019Ignazio and Klein insist that the \u201cobjectivity\u201d of data often conceals power relations: what is measured and what counts responds to priorities, not natural truths (D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020). In the case of generative language, the analogy is direct: what the model considers a \u201cgood response\u201d is defined by criteria of usefulness, safety, acceptability, and coherence. But the social life of language\u2014especially in feminist, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ struggles\u2014cannot always be acceptable. Sometimes truth arrives as conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this sense, bio-poiesis proposes recovering an ethic of situated speech: acknowledging from where one speaks, who is speaking, for whom one speaks, and what risks are taken in speaking. Only a vulnerable body (finite, mortal, exposed) can produce certain meanings, because only such a body bears consequences. The machine, by contrast, can produce syntax; but it cannot assume responsibility for what it enunciates. That limit is always political, not technical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">From critique to intervention: digital rights to sustain bio-poiesis<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Up to this point, bio-poiesis could be read as a cultural defense of situated writing. But in terms of digital rights, the point is stronger: sustaining bio-poiesis requires governance, infrastructure, and policy. If necro-logos is reproduced through scale and convenience, resistance cannot remain only at the individual level (\u201cwrite differently\u201d); it requires collective and institutional practices that dispute design, data, and legitimate uses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Within this framework, two types of regional intervention function as laboratories of the future: EDIA (V\u00eda Libre) and Latam-GPT. Not because they \u201csolve\u201d the problems of generative AI, but because they show how one can intervene from the margins in the question of who governs language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>EDIA (V\u00eda Libre): auditing necro-logos from the Global South<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The EDIA project by V\u00eda Libre, aimed at diagnosing and mitigating biases in language models from Latin America, can be read as a practice of bio-poiesis in a strict sense: it reintroduces the political question precisely where the model promises neutrality. Instead of accepting that the system \u201cspeaks well,\u201d EDIA asks: what representations does it reproduce? what stereotypes does it fix? what voices does it normalize? what identities does it turn into caricature?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What matters here is the methodological gesture: auditing bias is not only about measuring errors; it is about disputing the culture that the model tends to stabilize. In feminist terms, it insists that inequality is not a bug, but a structure embedded in data and design (D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020). In decolonial terms, it recognizes that the unequal distribution of voice in the global archive produces inequality in outputs. And in digital rights terms, it builds regional capacity to demand transparency, accountability, and reparations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A situated audit such as those promoted by EDIA also functions as a pedagogical practice: it teaches us to see the model not as an oracle, but as a cultural device. This critical literacy is central to sustaining bio-poiesis: it allows organizations, teachers, journalists, and activists not to treat outputs as \u201cfinal\u201d texts, but as inputs to be questioned. AI ceases to be authority; it becomes an object of dispute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>Latam-GPT: cultural sovereignty of language and the struggle over data<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Latam-GPT, as a regional project, opens another dimension: the possibility of building models anchored in Latin America. But from the perspective of bio-poiesis, the point is not to simply celebrate a \u201clocal GPT.\u201d The point is to recognize that linguistic sovereignty depends on data sovereignty and governance. A model can be hosted \u201cin the region\u201d and still reproduce coloniality if:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>it is trained on datasets extracted without consent;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>it privileges dominant registers;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>it fails to include marginalized languages and repertoires;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>and it lacks mechanisms of community return and control.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>If necro-logos turns fossilized pasts into norms, bio-poiesis demands asking: whose past is this? who authorized its extraction? who decides what is included? who benefits when that archive becomes a service?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ricaurte describes this process as the coloniality of data: extraction, processing, and value captured outside the communities that produce meaning (Ricaurte, 2019). In a regional project like Latam-GPT, the question becomes strategic: can a Latin American model become a device for repair, visibility, and linguistic pluralization? Yes\u2014but only if its design incorporates a feminist and justice-oriented ethics: participation, consent, care, and governance mechanisms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Other practices of resistance: journalism, education, art, activism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bio-poiesis is not limited to \u201cAI projects.\u201d It also appears in practices that reconfigure the social use of generative AI, preventing it from becoming a cultural norm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>Journalism: using AI without surrendering voice<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>In journalism, a bio-poietic practice would involve using AI for instrumental tasks (classifying, transcribing, organizing) while preserving writing as a space of responsibility: not delegating tone, not delegating framing, not delegating narrative ethics. This responds to Bender et al. (2021)\u2019s warning: fluency must not replace verification. In societies with high informational vulnerability, editorial responsibility is part of the right to information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>Education: critical literacy, not \u201ctask optimization\u201d<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>In education, bio-poiesis implies teaching how to read AI outputs as cultural production: detecting bias, locating standpoint, identifying neutralizations, and rewriting from within one\u2019s own context. Instead of evaluating \u201cefficiency,\u201d agency is evaluated: can you restore body to a text? can you restore conflict? can you restore language?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>Art and activism: error as political aesthetics<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>In art and activism, bio-poiesis can operate explicitly: using AI to produce friction rather than smoothness. Working with prompts that force contradictions, or with rewritings that expose stereotypes. In this case, AI becomes an object of performative critique: a mirror that reveals the norm in order to break it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Four lines of action in a digital rights framework<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To ensure that bio-poiesis does not remain an individual ethic, I conclude this axis with a minimal intervention program:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>Critical literacy of generative language<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Not only \u201chow to prompt,\u201d but how to read biases, detect neutralizations, recognize hegemonic styles, and rewrite from situated perspectives (Bender et al., 2021; D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>Situated and feminist auditing (EDIA model)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Develop regional methodologies to evaluate linguistic, cultural, and gender biases, with the participation of communities and organizations (D\u2019Ignazio &amp; Klein, 2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>Data governance and sovereignty<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Laws and policies that recognize the cultural dimension of data: consent, traceability, return, limits on extraction, and public rules for corpus usage (Ricaurte, 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>Design with justice and care (Latam-GPT as a site of struggle)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>If regional models are built, they should incorporate Design Justice principles: genuine participation, collective decision-making over corpora, and metrics oriented toward cultural plurality (Costanza-Chock, 2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>Reopening the future<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Necro-logos is not an apocalyptic metaphor: it is a political description of an emerging cultural regime in which prediction becomes norm and norm becomes world. Against this, bio-poiesis is not nostalgia for a \u201cpure human\u201d: it is a commitment to sustaining creativity as a vital, situated, and conflictual force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In Paraguay and the Global South, the struggle is not technical: it is cultural and political. It is fought in data, languages, institutions, education, journalism, feminisms. And it revolves around a simple but decisive question: are we going to delegate the production of meaning to an infrastructure that optimizes the past, or are we going to insist on writing the future from our bodies, territories, activisms, and the power of error?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>A. Philosophy of Technology and Critical Theory (The Hard Core)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Sadin, \u00c9. (2024). <em>La vie spectrale: Penser l&#8217;\u00e8re du m\u00e9tavers et des IA g\u00e9n\u00e9ratives<\/em>. \u00c9ditions Grasset. (Primary source for the concept of spectrality).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sadin, \u00c9. (2020). <em>Artificial Intelligence or the Challenge of the Century: Anatomy of a Radical Anti-Humanism<\/em>. Caja Negra Editora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sadin, \u00c9. (2022). <em>The Age of the Tyrant Individual: The End of a Common World<\/em>. Caja Negra Editora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Han, B.-C. (2022). <em>Infocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy<\/em>. Taurus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>B. Data Feminism, Decoloniality, and the Global South<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Ricaurte, P. (2019). Data Epistemologies, the Coloniality of Power, and Resistance. <em>Television &amp; New Media, 20<\/em>(4), 350\u2013365.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2010). <em>Ch\u2019ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on Decolonizing Practices and Discourses<\/em> (1st ed.). Tinta Lim\u00f3n.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>D\u2019Ignazio, C., &amp; Klein, L. (2020). <em>Data Feminism<\/em>. MIT Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Varon, J., &amp; Pe\u00f1a, P. (2021). Decolonising AI: A transfeminist methodology. Coding Rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). <em>Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need<\/em>. MIT Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Birhane, A. (2021). Algorithmic injustice: a relational ethics approach. <em>Patterns, 2<\/em>(2).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>C. Critical Computational Linguistics and AI Ethics<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., &amp; Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? <em>Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Crawford, K. (2021). <em>The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence<\/em>. Yale University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zuboff, S. (2019). <em>The Age of Surveillance Capitalism<\/em>. PublicAffairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>D. Essays and Popular Writing (2023\u20132025)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Chiang, T. (2023, February 9). ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. <em>The New Yorker<\/em>. Retrieved from newyorker.com<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lanier, J. (2023, April 20). There Is No A.I. <em>The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bogost, I. (2024, January). The Age of AI Has Begun. <em>The Atlantic<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>LaFrance, A. (2023). The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism. <em>The Atlantic<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Shipper, D. (2024). Think First, AI Second. Every.to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Koebler, J. (2024). The Internet Is Filling Up With AI Sludge. 404 Media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Warzel, C. (2023, February). The Enshittification of Everything. <em>The Atlantic<\/em>. (Useful for explaining the degradation of online content quality).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Klein, N. (2023, May 8). AI machines aren\u2019t \u2018hallucinating\u2019. But their makers are. <em>The Guardian<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The Atlantic<\/em>. (2025). A tool that crushes creativity (AI \u201cslop\u201d and erosion of cultural value\/relations).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The Atlantic<\/em>. (2022). Your creativity won\u2019t save your job from AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The New Yorker<\/em>. (2025). Will the humanities survive artificial intelligence?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The New Yorker<\/em>. (2025). A.I. is coming for culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The New Yorker<\/em>. (2025). A.I. is homogenizing our thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nature<\/em>. (2025). Can AI be truly creative?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Every.to. (2025). Think first, AI second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a><\/a> <strong>E. Regional and Local Reports<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>TEDIC. (2023). Online gender-based violence and algorithms: A Paraguayan perspective. CyborgFeminista.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Access Now. (n.d.). Artificial intelligence and human rights (resources and FAQ on generative AI).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Access Now. (2025). The use of artificial intelligence and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (submission to the UN). OHCHR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Derechos Digitales. (2024). Artificial intelligence, human rights, and social justice: Building futures from Latin America (PDF).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Karisma. (2023). Report on AI policy and copyright in Latin America. Fundaci\u00f3n Karisma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>DataG\u00e9nero. (2023). AymurAI: Responsible AI for open justice with a gender perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>UNDP (RBLAC). (2025). Gender bias in AI: Risks and opportunities (working paper\/report).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>International IDEA. (2025). Artificial intelligence and information integrity: Latin American experiences (PDF).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Latin America and the Caribbean Feminist AI Network. (2025). Call for concept notes \/ feminist data governance &amp; AI (PDF).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By: Araceli Ram\u00edrez Abstract Generative AI is no longer \u201cjust another tool\u201d: it is increasingly becoming a cultural infrastructure for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32266,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1233,1250],"tags":[1591,907,1600,1108],"class_list":["post-32265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-en","category-digital-inclusion","tag-democracia-en","tag-democracy","tag-inteligencia-artificial-en","tag-paraguay-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32267,"href":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32265\/revisions\/32267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tedic.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}