Travelling with(in) critical AI studies: An east Asian standpoint.

Abstract

How does critical AI studies itself travel, and what happens when it arrives elsewhere? This commentary reflects on the global circulation of critique from the standpoint of East Asia, where layered histories of modernization, technological aspiration, and cultural traditions generate alternative ways of knowing, imagining, and critiquing AI beyond South-North frameworks. Writing from my position as a graduate student from East Asia, now trained in a North American institution, I introduce three analytical vectors-tangle, transplant, and transmute-all of which emerge dialogically through my research on AI innovation in East Asia and through engagement with Asian media scholarship addressing similar concerns. Through vignettes from this research journey, I suggest that these themes illuminate how dominant critical vocabularies encounter local imaginaries, on-the-ground frictions, socio-cultural histories, and divergent ethical orientations. Rather than proposing a unified Asian critical theory of AI, I offer "traveling AI" as a reflexive praxis that centers relational co-constitution, situated reworking, and philosophical reorientation, while remaining attuned to epistemic tensions and power differentials. In dialogue with broader de-westernizing projects, this paper suggests that East Asia can contribute to reimagining critique not as theory from the center or the periphery, but as an ongoing praxis of troubling with in-betweenness.