Introduction

This book presents a dialogue between two seemingly incompatible bodies of social theories - Critical Political Economy and Southern approaches - to the study of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

In doing so, the book presents scholarly engagement with the ways in which AI is being experienced in sites in the Global South, with authors exploring questions of sociality, further entrenching of inequities along labour and caste lines, socio-legal ramifications of digital IDs, and undesired outcomes such as deepfakes and their integration in the political ecosystem, among others.

These perspectives interrogate and provide scholarly vocabulary to understand the various applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in our professional, legal and media spaces.