An Antropofagia approach to AI and creativity: Lessons from Latin America to rethink collectivity, process and meaning in creative value.

2025

Daniela Jaramillo-Dent /

Arora, Payal

International Journal of Cultural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779251346959

This paper provides a novel Latin American rooted ‘Antropofagia’ approach to creativity amid debates about the implications of creative work and image-generating Artificial Intelligence (AI). The article draws from this Indigenous cultural movement of symbolically cannibalizing colonial influences—absorbing them and turning them into something reflective of local communities’ own identity and heritage. Our ethnographic fieldwork involving 18 Ecuadorean artists examined their perspectives about ownership, value, and creativity and the potential role of image-generating AI technologies in their creative process. Findings reveal three tensions along the lines of collectivity/individuality, process/product, and meaning/novelty. Eight perspectives inform our Antropofagia framework to approach AI and creativity: obfuscation, recognition, traditionalization, distinction, rejection, complementarity, resignation, and apathy. Our proposed Antropofagic technologies decenter normative views around creative extraction/exploitation by providing situated, historical, and applied guidelines to promote agency among artists and enable the local to inform the global, in this case emerging from the Ecuadorean cultural space.