AI and Island Cultures Preservation, Extraction and the Right to Refuse

Artificial intelligence is entering island cultural life through translation, speech recognition, archives, recommendation systems and generative tools. It can widen access to smalllanguage media, reduce the labour of transcription and subtitling, and give island creators new means of production. Yet the same systems can misread culturally specific language, reward generic metropolitan aesthetics, extract cultural materials without meaningful consent and return synthetic versions of islands to the people from whom the source material came. This working paper argues that AI's cultural value for islands is conditional, not inherent. It should be judged by whether it increases the capacity of islanders to speak, remember, create and govern on their own terms. Evidence from Scottish Gaelic, Faroese, Kalaallisut, Sámi and Māori language technology shows both practical gains and recurring asymmetries in data, infrastructure and authority. Building on the AI-slands concepts of algorithmic mainlanding, synthetic islandness and insular AI sovereignty, the paper proposes an Island Cultural AI Charter and a research agenda for an AI-slands Observatory. The central conclusion is simple: preservation without authority can become extraction, and inclusion without the right to refuse is not cultural sovereignty. Drafting and site development for this working paper made use of AI tools; analytical claims, framework design and editorial judgement remain the author's, and sources have been checked prior to publication.