Salma Elkhaoudi

This project will investigate the development of Arabic-trained Artificial Intelligence (AI), and how imaginations about the Arab World, Arab Past, and Arab Future are brought into relation with one another through AI. Centering language as a site where cultural subjectivities and modern technocratic power relations are negotiated and transformed, this research will examine how Arabic AI development is deeply embedded in cultural, historical and political contexts by focusing on Natural Language Processing (NLP) as both a task domain of AI and the centripetal force in contemporary AI discourse. Through ethnographic fieldwork across NLP labs in the Arab Gulf, the project will investigate how laboratories become dynamic places of knowledge production shaped by movement, histories, and a dwelling within the Arabic language itself — particularly as linguists and engineers in these labs come from different Arab and non-Arab backgrounds, for which the idea of an “Arab future” might mean something entirely different. By shedding light on the complex negotiations and anxieties that underlie the development of Arabic-trained AI, this project will contribute to ongoing debates about the future of language, the nature of cultural subject-making, and the impact of AI on society and culture in the Arab world and beyond.