Divided by Machines: Extreme Speech, Deception, and the Limits of Artificial Intelligence by Sahana Udupa

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Sahana Udupa

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Sahana Udupa

Divided by Machines: Extreme Speech, Deception, and the Limits of Artificial Intelligence
Author:	Sahana Udupa
ISBN:	9789376540495
Binding:	Hardcover
Year:	2027
Pages:	336 with 16 b/w images and 12 tables
Size:	16 x 24 cm
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About the Book

Traces how generative AI folds into existing patterns of prejudice, propaganda and political extremities.

From deep fakes and voice clones to synthetic media, the rise of artificial intelligence is often cast as a monumental crisis—a "democracy-killing machine" capable of unravelling the social fabric. In Divided by Machines, Sahana Udupa offers a vital intervention, arguing that generative AI does not operate in a vacuum. Instead, it folds into existing paradigms of political disinformation and long-standing patterns of online and offline prejudice.

Udupa explores the tension between AI as a hypervisible threat and its role as generic infrastructure, normalized through the recommendation algorithms and voice assistants that shape our daily lives. Drawing on diverse ethnographic research—ranging from right-wing discourses and Elon Musk’s theatrics to deep fakes in Germany, misogyny in Brazil, and digital influence operations in India—she reveals how AI technologies are woven into social scenes of vitriol. She proposes “AI extremities” as sociocultural constellations of synthetic speech, deception and entrenched practices of exclusion and belonging. By centering these sociocultural constellations, Udupa demonstrates that social worlds do not merely contextualize technology; they define its limits and determine its power.

Moving beyond the binary of dystopian dread and techno-solutionism, Divided by Machines provides a nuanced look at AI extremities while dismantling the myth of technological inevitability. It offers a necessary framework for reimagining a digital future that respects responsible barriers in the political sphere. Ultimately, Udupa advocates for a pivotal principle of slowing down.

About the Author

Sahana Udupa

Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology at the University of Munich (LMU), BKC Faculty Associate at Harvard University, and author of Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics and co-author of Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media. She is also coeditor of Handbook on Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence; Digital Hate: The Global Conjuncture of Extreme Speech; and Media as Politics in South Asia.

Editorial Reviews

“AI can’t do anything by itself. In Divided by Machines, Sahana Udupa’s cosmopolitan ethnographic theorizing carries the reader through the social worlds that give AI its unsettling effects, from the intimacy of the family group chat to the national stage of political advertising.”
—Nick Seaver, author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation

Customer Reviews