Community-Controlled Artificial Intelligence
See also: AI as a Commons.
Context
By Vasilis Kostakis and Aristotle Tympas:
"We do not need enormous computing power to run functional AI systems. The energy-intensive nature of today's AI is not a technical necessity – it is a consequence of profit-seeking design choices. Tech giants promote gigantic models requiring vast energy and water because they're designed to do everything for everyone: a logic serving scale and profit, not efficiency.
Smaller, specialised models trained strategically can match larger ones in performance while remaining interpretable, efficient, and locally deployable (Hao, 2025; Gunasekar et al., 2023). This opens a different path: not AI as corporate infrastructure we must rent, but AI as commons – openly accessible, collectively maintained, and governed democratically by those who use and contribute to it (Bollier & Helfrich, 2019)."
(https://policyreview.info/articles/news/ai-commons/2055)
Example
By Vasilis Kostakis and Aristotle Tympas:
"Real examples exist. Te Hiku Media in Kaitaia, New Zealand – a remote rural town with high poverty and a large indigenous population – demonstrates what is possible. This non-profit Māori media organisation, led by CEO Peter-Lucas Jones and chief technology officer Keoni Mahelona, created an AI model to revitalise te reo, the endangered Māori language (Hao, 2025). With community consent, they collected 310 hours of recordings from 2,500 people within 10 days. They purchased Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) hardware at a 50% discount and trained their own model locally using open-source tools (Hao, 2025). They also created a licence ensuring their data would not be used against their community (Hao, 2025). This is AI serving community needs, not profit."