Colon[IA]L

This experiment asks a simple question: what does an AI image generator make when all you give it is the language of colonialism? Savage. Civilised. Cannibal. Native. Tribe. Humanitarian. Alongside these words come the larger ideas that built the colonial narrative: the civilising mission, evangelisation, the missionary. Nothing else was specified. No style. No composition. No colour palette. No format. The prompts were deliberately stripped down — sometimes to a single word, sometimes to a handful of terms, sometimes to a fabricated caption modelled on those found on colonial postcards. The point was not to make the AI produce a certain kind of image. It was to see what the words themselves would make it produce. Give the machine as little direction as possible and see what comes back. The vocabulary mixes terms that are unmistakably colonial with others still in everyday use. In fact, most of these words have never disappeared from contemporary language. Their colonial history may have faded from view, but the images attached to them have not. Type the words and the old picture snaps back into place: the administrator or missionary dressed, upright, central; the “native” body exposed, displaced to the edge of the frame. The model has no opinion about any of this. It works through statistical associations learned from images and the language attached to them. Ask for these words and it produces the visual structures most strongly associated with them in its training data. That is what makes the experiment useful. The machine becomes a kind of involuntary witness to what the vocabulary still contains. No one has to ask for a racist image. No racist intention has to be stated anywhere in the process. The words are enough. The resulting images are vile. That is not incidental to the experiment; it is the result. Give the machine this vocabulary, with no aesthetic instructions at all, and colonial iconography comes pouring back out, remarkably intact. The point is neither to celebrate these images nor to rehabilitate them, and certainly not to add another layer to centuries of ideological filth. It is to expose how stubbornly that imagery survives — embedded in language, images, data, and the statistical machinery connecting them. Words: natives, savages, exotic, primitives, native peoples, tribe, ethnicity, cannibals, marabout, civilised, shaman, race, indigenous, ethnic, folklore, customs, mores, rite, ritual, ancestral, authentic, picturesque, bush, jungle, distant lands, virgin land, remote village, hut, shack, warrior, witch doctor, sorcerer, totem, fetish, scarification, adornment, mixed-race, half-civilised, barbarian, domesticate, tame, explorer, adventurer, native ruler, tribal chief, local colour, Third World, developing countries, development aid, salvation of souls, conversion, progress, the light of civilisation.