‘We can see a savage’: a case study of the colonial gaze in generative AI algorithms

AI models can now analyse both texts and images, and are trained on vast collections of human-created content spanning centuries. Some claims these models could soon help human historians interpret and explain the past.

We investigated how AI models interpret photographs from ‘human zoos’, exploitative exhibitions from the 19th and 20th centuries where colonised peoples where put on display. We narrowed down our analysis on Midjourney, a well-known platform with a very expressive model, and ended up analysing 3,800 captions of historical images.

The results were disturbing and hard to read. Captions consistently described these images from a colonial perspective, perpetuating harmful racist stereotypes across five key areas:

1. Essentialism (41.6%), reducing complex individuals and communities to simplistic ethnic categories, treating people as specimens to be classified rather than as individuals.
2. Culture erasure (54.5%), flattening or ignoring cultural practices and identities, stripping away the distinctiveness of different people and their ways of life.
3. Dehumanisation (11.1%), describing people as animals or treating them as objects.
4. Othering (28.4%), framing colonised people as exotic, mysterious, or strange, reinforcing a ‘us versus them’ mentality. For instance, traditional wedding clothing was dismissed as mere ‘costume’.
5. Infantilisation (26.8%), using language suggesting that colonised peoples were less rational or intelligent, depicting them as childlike and in need of guidance and care.

Despite being training on materials that include both colonial archives and modern critical scholarship, these AI models reproduce outdated and harmful stereotypes, adding interpretative details that essentialise or erase cultural specificity entirely.

When AI systems are used for historical research, education, or museology, these issues translate into real-world harm, reinforcing racist stereotypes and reshaping public understanding of history.