Baker’s colonial, orientalist gaze is reflected in his descriptions of the newly annexed colony as  a degenerate country whose people are in need of salvation by the British empire. These descriptions are juxtaposed with the images generated by the AI model. Western bias has been generally shown to surface AI-related systems of all disparate sorts and on many different occasions, be it Google’s computer vision’s system labelling black people as gorillas, or Beauty.AI, an AI-judged beauty contest that has been shown to significantly favour white individuals of Caucasian origin. This bias is also evident to an extent by the images generated by the COCO dataset, many of them reminiscent of landscapes and flora that do not exist in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Who creates and who consumes the world’s digital infrastructure? At a time when an ever-greater part of the world’s population has online presence, while the AI-related technologies that are expected to shape the future of our societies are being developed and deployed by a very small group of powerful, and predominantly western, countries. When existent AI models already fail to account for anything that cannot be well appropriated with a Western, male perspective, what is the future place of countries such as Cyprus in the world map of this emergent digital era? The project aims give agency to a geographic region, the cultural and historical idiosyncrasies of which are generally not reflected in present day AI research.