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KEM-LAURIN LUBIN

@dr.kemlaurin

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I write & teach #tech #culture #rhetoric #power #author of 2 #design texts #AI and #designjustice #Kwéyòl 🇱🇨📍🇨🇦 @aiglobalsouthsummit

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Two conversations I am really looking forward to this fall. ✨

Every day, systems make decisions about us: who gets the loan, the interview, the benefit. Most of us never see how, and there's rarely anyone to call when they get it wrong. So I keep coming back to three simple questions:

_ Can I see how I was read by the machine?

_Who answers when the machine is wrong?

_Can I say no and still be served?

Come say hello if you're there. 🤎

#DigitalEquity #AILiteracy #ResponsibleAI #Guelph #WaterlooRegion by @dr.kemlaurin

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18 days ago

Free to read on substack this weekend!
Wish her music was on Instagram but @kassav_official
suits the mood.😊 #Kréyol #kreyolheritage

🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨
A more personal post than I usually share, though it turned out to be about the very thing I always write about: power, and what time does to it.

When I was a small child, a luminous woman used to come to my grandparent's house - mostly on weekends, arriving in regalia, going to or coming from a performance. I sat on a small wooden bench, seen and not heard. But I remember the style, the exuberance, the voice.

Years later I understood who had been standing in our house. She was my cousin on my father's side, Marie Selipha Descartes, known across the Caribbean as Sesenne.

She grew up singing in Kwéyòl, Saint Lucia's Creole, at a time when the British colonial authorities barred its use. Her language was treated as something to be shamed out of her. And yet she kept singing in it. In 1969 she represented Saint Lucia at the regional CARIFTA Expo and won, the whole audience singing her refrain back so loudly they drowned out her own voice.

Then came the turn that still stops me and should stop us all. The child whose language the empire tried to punish was, in 2000, made a Dame of the British Empire, by the very Crown whose administration had once prohibited the culture she carried. The system that tried to silence her lived long enough to bow to her.

She was always the Queen of "our" Culture. The titles only confirmed, decades late, what her people knew when she was eight.

I wrote about her, and about power and time.

Please reshare our stories. taken in St Lucia, Caribbean by @dr.kemlaurin

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4 months ago

Endorsement: Dr. Kem-Laurin Lubin
Dr. Kem-Laurin Lubin is a Critical AI Scholar and Computational Rhetorician at the University of Waterloo, and a Post-doctoral Fellow at CIGI’s Digital Policy Hub.
“I have known Colleen through our community for a few years, but mostly through her work launching Democracy in Action Waterloo Region, which encourages residents, especially young people, to get involved in local democracy.”
“She listens before she decides, and she is open about [her decision] and why.”
Thank you, Dr. Lubin, for your endorsement!
Colleen James is running for Regional Councillor in Kitchener.
🗳️ Advance polls: October 13–17 🗳️ Election Day: October 26 by @dr.kemlaurin

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5 days ago

“A society could pass every democratic test and still deliver its citizens, one by one, into automated verdicts they cannot read, cannot contest, and cannot escape. The failure is not the technology. It is that personhood was never on the checklist, and every harm that follows gets minimized as a technical glitch rather than named as what it is: a person, erased from the ledger of things worth verifying.”

@dr.kemlaurin and I write about the LAR framework in our latest editorial for the Canadian Science Policy Centre.

🔗 in bio by @dr.kemlaurin

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a month ago

I lifted this from someone on LinkedIn and it captures so much of how I feel.

It's why I cant socialize broadly because someone will say something that captures that selfish energy and ...😔🤔🤬

This, for me, captures the mentality of those who say things like "it's really bad here for brown and black people" alluding to something someone told me about working in the US (she is Canadian). Then she said what made me see her soul "they don't bother white people for the most part tho."

And this person teaches at a university. Great role model!

I sat in grad classes with her. I was stunned. I was disgusted.

To those who still think whiteness will save you.

This also applies to so much going on in the world. If you don't understand #Ubuntu then we cannot be friends.. We are persons by virtue of others being persons. Simple. If genocide does not hurt your soul. If children labou4rng in Mineral camps in the Congo, to make your phones, is a gloss over for you. If you even don't know where Sudan is, I feel sorry for you. Humanity needs us all to recognize humanity. by @dr.kemlaurin

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16 days ago

For centuries, Black writers have had to prove they wrote their own work. AI detectors have given that old doubt a new form, and a percentage that looks like evidence.

This month, the question returned. On October 6, 2026, the Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza won the Caine Prize for African Writing. Within days, a major magazine reported that an AI detector had flagged almost all of his story as machine-generated. This time, the authority being consulted was not a panel of Boston gentlemen. It was a percentage.

I have a personal interest in how that percentage is produced. An AI detector recently told me that passages from my own 2012 book, published by Elsevier, copyedited and printed a decade before any of these systems existed, had been written by a machine. So I went and found out how these tools work. This essay explains what I learned, and why it matters for the writers who have always been asked to prove themselves.

I have come to not trust what a system that is so skewed in so many other biases, tell me what is, especially when I can't read it back.

AI detectors are not science
#ai #aibias #languagebias #writingwhileblack
#writers by @dr.kemlaurin

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3 days ago

Now this is the kind of real life situation that my research is meant to address. What happens when AI is allowed to characterise us?

If tpu haven't hear the story of Sienna Rose then take a memt to read my latest Substack.

--
At first, Sienna Rose was presented as a white, red-haired singer-songwriter. Then she was a brunette. Then she was a Black woman singing neo-soul and R&B. When the Black version took off, the other two quietly disappeared from most streaming services. By January 2026, Sienna Rose had more than three million monthly listeners on Spotify and three songs on its Viral 50 chart in the United States. Selena Gomez set a Golden Globes post to one of her tracks, then took it down when people started asking whether Sienna Rose existed at all. Deezer, the French streaming service, said it was “certain” she did not.

Another colonial move. Now stealing our faces for profit.

#black #digitalblackface #ai #airegulations ##aiethics by @dr.kemlaurin

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9 days ago

A central idea in my research is that AI systems characterize us.
How do they do this? They build a picture of who we are from our data, then make decisions about us based on it, whether for a job, a loan, immigration or health care.

In “Sex after Technology,” Randy Harris and I looked at what happens to period-tracking app data after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Information shared innocently can become evidence. Applying for a job today raises a similar question. Applications ask about sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and race, and software increasingly reads the answers. Who sees them, and what does “prefer not to say” signal?

My new essay: Substack link in bio.

I would love to hear your thoughts, as it matters to so many people going through the motions of job hunting and feeling like a bit of themselves is lost every time they're asked intrusive questions.
#FutureOfWork #Hiring #AI #Discrimination #AIBias by @dr.kemlaurin

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4 days ago

Free to read on this holiday long weekend...

On a Monday evening in October 2025, Taki Allen was sitting outside Kenwood High School in Baltimore County with his friends, waiting for a ride after football practice. He had just finished a bag of Doritos, crumpled it up and put it in his pocket. About twenty minutes later, by his account, eight police cars pulled up. Officers approached with guns, told him to get on his knees and handcuffed him. They searched him and found nothing.

#AI #facialrecognition #surveillance #society #technology by @dr.kemlaurin

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5 days ago

If the people building this say it could kill us, why don’t they just stop?

In 1975, biologists at Asilomar, California, paused their own research on recombinant DNA until they had agreed on safety rules. In 1963, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, rivals in the most dangerous arms race in history, agreed to stop testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. In 1972, nations agreed to ban biological weapons. In 1987, the world agreed in Montreal to phase out chemicals that destroy the ozone layer, and it worked.

Check out my latest substack essay. We are all talking about this. Why cant they stop?
#AI #technology #existential #society #democracy by @dr.kemlaurin

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7 days ago

This happened today. Forgot to share. My other post has dits bit what an honour to be in community about my research #ai #blackinAI #caribbeanInAI #blackscholar #blackinCanadianAI
🇨🇦🖤✨️
@acbn_canada @setsicommunitycoalition @lblackinnovationhub by @dr.kemlaurin

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7 days ago

Every time I sit down with peers who work on AI, the conversation turns to Flock cameras. Someone mentions a news story. Someone else has seen one on a pole near their kid’s school. Heads nod. Everyone has an opinion.So here is my attempt at a plain-language guide: what Flock is, why it keeps making headlines, what is happening here in Canada, and three simple questions any of us can ask about it.

#flock #DigitalPolicy #surveillance #dataprivacy #democracy by @dr.kemlaurin

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12 days ago