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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in southern France, this paper shows how AI becomes a moral and political signifier in everyday talk to test belonging, code distrust, and normalize exclusion. Despite limited use, it shows how AI imaginaries reproduce oppression through an "ordinary ethics" and extreme speech.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in a small town in southern France, this paper examines how AI becomes entangled with everyday forms of political exclusion and “soft” authoritarianism, not through spectacular technologies of warfare or surveillance, but through mundane practices of discourse, suspicion, and moral evaluation. I show how AI circulates as a floating signifier of both modernity and threat, invoked in conversations about immigration, national decline, misinformation, and social disorder, even in contexts where concrete AI adoption remains limited. In these interactions, AI talk becomes a way of probing political alignment and testing moral boundaries, resonating with what Udupa (2024) describes as the infrastructures of extreme speech, where ambiguity and coded language enable exclusionary politics while preserving plausible deniability. In a town in which AI is not yet widely accessed, rather than treating AI as a fait accompli, the paper traces how AI imaginaries-in-the-making have begun to coalesce as tools for politicizing technology, legitimizing hierarchies of credibility, and naturalizing authoritarian discourse: from café conversations in which residents invoke AI-generated “fake news” to express distrust of immigrants or journalists, to Telegram exchanges in which suspicions about chatbots code distrust of the "establishment," rooted in anxieties about national decline, deception, and moral authority. Expanding the anthropology of AI beyond sites of high-tech governance or algorithmic surveillance, the paper shows how ordinary people participate in the reproduction of oppression through AI talk and an "ordinary ethics" (Lambek 2010) in which fears of deception, automation, and manipulation become resources for exclusionary politics.