AI refusal: a cultural politics

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are producing and solidifying uneven relations of power and, thus, also altering the stakes, mechanisms, and possibilities of refusal. The questions we ask in the papers included in this special issue are: What are the possibilities and stakes of refusal in a world saturated with the spaces, infrastructures, affects, algorithms, and discourses of AI? How might AI alter, diminish, or expand the capacities for digital refusal? To address these questions, we argue, it is crucial to understand AI as a deeply cultural regime whose battle for adoption and development is fought in the domains of aesthetics, economies, identities, cultural production, and knowledge. Recognizing the ways that subjects and places differentially encounter and make sense of AI and its effects in the spaces and rhythms of everyday life, the contributions in this special issue examine cultural practices as potentially privileged, if messy and imperfect, sites of AI refusal. Each paper offers a different vantage point to consider the complex relational and spatial entanglements between humans and AI, presenting different perspectives on what exactly is refused in practices of AI refusal.