Captain Cook's back and he's got a shiny new coat.
At the same time, I’ve watched many of those same people and organisations talk passionately about the importance of sovereignty. Which for me is inclusive of data sovereignty in today’s world of AI.
Watching growing army of “Indigenous UGC” creators, complete with tiny lapel microphones, phones held at arm’s length and people endlessly interviewing each other, are all feeding the same mega-algorithm and turning our voices, stories, faces and cultural content into data for someone else’s machine. All of this not new to our everyday lives of sharing.
And before anyone reaches for the pitchforks this isn’t an argument against technology, content creation or AI. Anyone that knows me know that I am an advocate and strong believer of use of technology in providing solution and for our mob. But importantly for us to lead our own ways forward enhanced through technology.
Captain Cook has returned and this time he’s arrived with a shiny new digital coat, a subscription to ChatGPT and Claude and an army of algorithms ready to map the territory and our culture again and send it all in data centre thousands of mile away.
Colonisation wasn’t simply about ships arriving on our shores. It was about control of Country, resources, knowledge, stories and identity. Ultimately, it was about taking away our power to determine our own future and creating systems designed to control, manipulate and disconnect us from our right to shape that future for ourselves.
They failed, by the way. We’re still here. And our struggle to determine our own future continues.
So why would we willingly hand over another layer of that control to technology without first stopping to ask: What are we giving away? Who gains control? And what does that mean for our sovereignty in the future?
How much control are we prepared to hand over to AI and big tech and what happens to our images, voices, stories, cultural knowledge, creative ideas and intellectual property once they enter these systems??
What happens when an entire generation grows up believing that creating something means simply prompting a machine to make it for them or that sharing our stories in 90 sec bitly interview for a likes and shares is protection of our knowledge and stories. All of this is simply feeding the system that is extracting our culture and knowledge and creating massive data set about us and our cultures.
For our young people, this conversation is going to become increasingly important.
Digital sovereignty won’t just be about organisations controlling their data, platforms and intellectual property. It will also be about individuals understanding what they create, what they share, what they give away to technology is shaping our future digital identity.
When I first started experimenting with AI in 2023, it knew very little about our cultures. By 2026, that has changed. AI increasingly understands our cultures, our ways of knowing, our languages and even our slang.
Why? Because we have fed the system.
We have contributed our words, stories, images, knowledge, conversations and cultural content to the digital systems that now learn from them. The question is no longer simply what AI can do. It’s what we have given it access to, and who ultimately has control over what it learns from us.
I tell the young people that I mentor at Indigenous Design Labs:
You’ve already been feeding the AI beast for years, your created the mass AI generations that is evolving without any cultural or societal controls.
Since the arrival of social media, we’ve been willingly, or perhaps unknowingly feeding the machine our photographs, interests, habits, opinions, conversations, movements and late-night scrolling behaviour through the little screens we carry everywhere.
AI didn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere.
It simply pulled up a stump at the campfire and started having a yarn with us.
The difference now is that it can consume, analyse, replicate and generate at a scale we’ve never experienced before.
And that brings us back to Captain Cook.
We’ve spent generations talking about what happens when outsiders arrive, claim the territory, map it, name it, extract from it and tell us what it means. We probably shouldn’t be doing the digital equivalent ourselves.
At this rate, we might need to get the ropes out and rein this AI horse in before it bolts over the horizon, rides straight through our cultural integrity and leaves our creativity and knowledge flattened in the dust.
AI can be a useful tool. But it shouldn’t become the artist, the storyteller, the cultural authority or the bloke in the room who gets the last word. Importantly our organisations need to pull the rains on how their content is being created and pulling back to stop the propagation of AI content creation and sharing from within their organisations and businesses. For one our mob don’t value AI creations and two it’s not culturally sound and your simply sharing our knowing and stories feeding that massive data set.
It’s time to stop and rethink how we, as mob, are using these systems.
What are we actually gaining from them and what are we handing over?
Every video, interview, image, story, voice and piece of cultural knowledge we feed into these platforms becomes part of a much bigger machine. The machine designed to capture, learn from, predict and optimise our behaviour for someone else’s benefit.
Technology can be a powerful tool for mob, but only if we remain in control of how, where and why it is used.
Use the tool. Don’t let the tool use you. We need to keep our hand on the reins.
We need to start asking harder questions. Who owns the data? Who and what is appropriate to share and create? Who controls the systems? What happens to our knowledge once it disappears into the algorithm? And are we strengthening our own digital sovereignty or simply feeding someone else’s?
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