Crafting Arabic: The Politics and Ethics of Making AI Language Models in Jordan Feb. 5

[Arts Communications]

How do artificial intelligence technologies move across languages? What assumptions about language and linguistic difference become embedded in the design of AI models? How has the rapid emergence of AI models reshaped the way we conceptualize language?

Join the Department of Anthropology for the latest Brown Bag Talk - Crafting Arabic: The Politics and Ethics of Making AI Language Models in Jordan.

When: Thursday February 5, 2026 at 4:30 p.m.

Where: ML 109

Speaker: Tariq Adely, PhD Candidate, George Washington University, Department of Anthropology

More about the talk:

This talk addresses such questions by focusing on the experiences and perspectives of workers who produce AI language models for Arabic. Drawing on ethnographic field research in the IT sector in Amman, Jordan, it highlights how workers and stakeholders—from engineers to project managers, linguists to data labelers — put forward different conceptions of Arabic to assert the value of their labor and to align AI models with their cultural worldviews, ethical commitments, and professional aspirations. In doing so, they challenge the inequitable labor divisions that structure the transnational AI industry and broader colonial language ideologies that cast Arabic as too antiquated or complicated to support technological progress. Ultimately, this talk asks how deep-seated beliefs and long-standing debates about language—in addition to the hierarchies of knowledge and value they reproduce—mediate how people experience and seek to shape the global circulation of AI language models.
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