# Acknowledgments LLMS index: [llms.txt](/en/llms.txt) --- A core theme of this book is belief. Belief in deep learning. Belief in AGI. Self-belief. How belief mobilizes and incites. Who is and isn’t to be believed. Belief is a powerful and intoxicating thing. And in my own career, it has been the belief of so many people in me and my work that has been my greatest enabler. Thank you first and foremost to the people who believed in this book project. I especially owe so much to all my sources. Many spoke to me despite legal or other risks because they believed in truth, transparency, and accountability. Many were also extremely generous with their time—inviting me to their homes, showing me around their communities, or sitting for upward of ten hours of interviews across multiple sessions. I will never take for granted the leap of faith someone makes to open up their heart and mind to a journalist. It is an absolute honor to tell your stories. Thank you. Without you, this book simply wouldn’t exist. My sincere gratitude to David Doerrer, my wonderful agent, who was first to commit his time and support to me to develop my ideas for this book before I had anything worthy to show him. It was through his patience, his probing questions, and, most importantly, his ability to kindly and firmly tell me when something just wasn’t working that I began to see how my scattered collection of thoughts could form the basis of a book. To Scott Moyers at Penguin Press, any writer’s dream of an editor, who immediately understood my vision and whose unfailing support ever since allowed me to pursue it in its most ambitious form. Not only was he a moral compass and cheerleader throughout my reporting and writing process, providing incisive and illuminating feedback, he and Ann Godoff also committed Penguin Press’s financial and legal resources to support the book’s creation. Reporting and writing a book like this is expensive, sensitive, and time-consuming. Among many other things, it requires hiring researchers and factcheckers; paying for flights, accommodations, local collaborators, translators, and drivers to spend time on the ground embedded within communities. Scott and Ann made it possible for me to do all of that and to work on this book full time. To Mia Council at Penguin Press, whose sharp and compassionate edits gave me the prompting and security I needed to take risks in and push my writing to the next level. Her masterful coordination behind the scenes made the entire editing and production process feel so seamless. I am sure I didn’t even see half of the logistical chaos that Mia so expertly contained. Thank you also to the rest of the stellar Penguin Press and Penguin Random House US and UK teams, including Yuki Hirose, Gail Brussel, Juli Kiyan, Danielle Plafsky, Laura Stickney, Kim Walker, Rosie Brown, Lotte Hall, Karen Dziekonski, and the many others with whom I didn’t interface directly but were critical to the process. To my incredible fact-checking team: Lindsay Muscato, Matt Mahoney, Rima Parikh, and Muriel Alarcón. All four of them fastidiously combed through the draft, cross-checking the labyrinth of details against documents and sources, and stress-testing my word choices. Matt also supported early research in my book, and Lindsay fielded many calls from me to serve as the most patient sounding board, while Rima somehow turned her fact-checking notes into standup comedy. They are all lifesavers. Muriel was also my reporting partner extraordinaire in Chile and Uruguay. She is a one-woman wonder: She conducted research, coordinated interviews, chased down sources, and played both translator and driver across two weeks of nonstop reporting, all with the most beautiful, joyous energy. We had so many great laughs and adventures. Thank you to everyone else who supported me in my reporting trips, especially Stephen Thuo Kiguru, my intrepid guide through Nairobi who was there for anything I needed and whose humor and relentless optimism remained unflappable even when someone called the cops on him after one of our excursions due to a gross miscommunication. That is a story for another time. To my dear friends and mentors: Angela Chen, Gideon Lichfield, Roger McNamee, Brenda Guadalupe López Alatorre, Jose Manuel Rodriguez Moreno, Bina Venkataraman, and Tate Ryan-Mosley, who generously read early drafts of the book or various excerpts and gave me wise and invaluable feedback. To Oren Etzioni, who graciously reviewed my recounting of AI history and all of my technical explanations of AI research to ensure they were correct and appropriately nuanced. To Ria Kalluri, whose friendship was a source of strength and joy long before we both began investigating the colonial nature of AI development, and whose intellectual and moral clarity on the subject has been a guiding light. This book also draws upon reporting and work I did throughout my journalism career. I would be remiss not to thank all of the people who supported me along the way. All my gratitude to Janet Guyon, my editor at Quartz, who was the first person who knew what she was talking about to tell me she believed I could make a great journalist. To Gideon, then the editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, who made a crazy bet to give me my first full-time job in journalism, to cover artificial intelligence, no less, putting me on a yearslong journey I could have never imagined. To Niall Firth, my editor at Tech Review, who said to me one day, Why don’t you profile OpenAI? when I had never profiled a company before. For whatever reason, Niall believed I could do it. And I worked harder and pushed myself further to prove him right. When I started realizing and turning my attention to the vast global inequality that AI was perpetuating, Niall was also instrumental in supporting my new line of inquiry, as was Angela, the colleague I referenced in chapter 4 who identified the phrase “data colonialism” in existing scholarship and helped point me in the right direction. Mat Honan, who took over from Gideon as chief editor, quickly understood the importance of my investigations and wholeheartedly supported me in pursuing them further. In late 2021, I went on leave from Tech Review to pursue a six-month reporting project about “AI colonialism” with the wonderful support of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism fellowship and a Pulitzer Center AI Accountability grant. I am indebted to Deborah Blum and Ashley Smart at MIT KSJ and Marina Walker Guevara and Boyoung Lim at the Pulitzer Center for giving me the funding to pursue such an expansive project in the middle of the pandemic. The result, a four-part series with stories from South Africa, Venezuela, Indonesia, and New Zealand, laid the groundwork for the thesis and, ultimately, the title of this book. Thank you to my incredible collaborators on those stories: Heidi Swart, Andrea Paola Hernández, and Nadine Freischlad, whose reporting expertise, language skills, and deep local and cultural context made those stories richer than I ever could have alone. It was under Marina’s visionary leadership in global journalistic collaborations that I connected with Heidi, Andrea, and Nadine in the first place, and learned a new approach for tackling globe-spanning reporting projects. The Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network, which brings together journalists from around the world to advance AI accountability reporting, has since become one of my most important professional communities. At The Wall Street Journal, it was my editor Josh Chin who first encouraged me to pitch what ultimately became a front-page story about Mophat Okinyi and the Kenyan workers who contracted for OpenAI; Drew Dowell and Jason Dean helped secure my reporting trip to make it happen. At The Atlantic, my editor Damon Beres needed no convincing when I pitched him a wonky story about the environmental impacts of the computing infrastructure behind AI, nor did Paul Bisceglio or Adrienne LaFrance, who green-lit another reporting trip to Arizona. Thank you also to Bradley Olson, Deepa Seetharaman, Daniel Engber, and Matteo Wong for helping me bring those stories to fruition. Working alongside my inimitable colleagues at both publications gave me a whole new understanding of what it means to report and write stories at the highest levels of mastery. Finally, my deepest love and gratitude to my family. To my mom, who saw my love of writing as a little girl and poured everything she ever had into helping me achieve my dreams. To my dad, who never once questioned doing whatever he could to support me. To my 奶奶, my unending source of inspiration. To my in-laws, who wisely remind me to savor the process and celebrate the wins. To my husband: best friend, life partner, moral compass, cheerleader, number one fan, early reader, sounding board, advice giver, endless romantic. Loving you and being loved by you is my foundation for everything.