AI is often presented as if it produces knowledge from nowhere. But behind its apparent nobodyness and nowhereness are choices about whose knowledge is collected, whose work becomes source material and who governs the system. This essay asks what self-authorship requires in the age of AI and proposes four acts of refusal through which we can resist erasure and retain authority over what we know, what we produce and who we become.

Xi Jinping’s call for international cooperation on AI signals that a new geopolitical contest is taking shape. For the Caribbean and wider Global South, access to AI is not enough. Meaningful participation requires ownership, institutional authority and influence over the rules without being confined to choosing between competing Chinese and American technological systems.