Who Pays for Your Prompt? AI, Digital Coloniality and the Workers Who Contest It

Who Pays for Your Prompt? AI, Digital Coloniality and the Workers Who Contest It

AI, digital coloniality and data workers’ labour rights: how generative AI depends on outsourced, low-paid data work in Kenya and Nigeria, and how workers contest it through litigation (Motaung v. Meta/Sama) and a GDPR reverse-audit.

October 2026

Mary-Rose Deyanov (author); supervised by Mouzayian Khalil.

Generative AI is usually presented as an autonomous, clean technology whose costs lie in how we consume it or in its energy use. This paper will argue that it is neither autonomous nor green, but an extractive socio-technical system mapped on historical capitalist and colonial foundations, best understood and presented as digital coloniality. Drawing on court records, the Fairwork assessment of Sama, a GDPR reverse-audit conducted with African data workers and peer-reviewed scholarship, this paper will examine how algorithmic management, precarity and psychological harm discipline workers and why participation in AI supply chains, is not equivalent to development. This paper will show workers contesting this system through litigation and data access requests but finds that these tools expose its foundations without dismantling them. It will conclude that said harm must be confronted before it becomes visible.

artificial intelligence, digital coloniality, data colonialism, data workers, content moderation, Kenya, Nigeria, Meta, Sama, GDPR, algorithmic management, outsourcing, labour rights, technological exceptionalism, global supply chains, Global South, Capitalism,