Ambassador’s Voice | André Fischer

Founder of the MixBrasil festival, AI consultant and doctoral researcher at the Federal University of São Carlos (Brazil), André Fischer is one of the most distinctive voices in the debate on artificial intelligence and culture. From São Paulo, he observes how AI can simultaneously liberate marginalised creators and reproduce, on a vast scale, the biases of dominant societies. Ambassador of the We Are Human Festival, he advocates for digital sovereignty built from the Global South.

«AI reproduces inequalities if we let it»: André Fischer, between militant cinema and the digital revolution

 

André Fischer's trajectory towards artificial intelligence is far from a late conversion. For several years now, this pioneer of LGBTQIA+ cinema in Brazil has also been a consultant, speaker and researcher specialising in the ethical issues of AI in audiovisual. His doctorate addresses precisely the question of authorship in artificial intelligence: who creates, who owns, who is responsible, when a machine produces a work? This is not an abstract question for him: he is himself producing a feature film integrating AI and manages a network of Brazilian companies and institutions around these issues. "It is a financial necessity as much as an intellectual one," he acknowledges pragmatically. This double life, between theory and practice, between São Paulo and Aix-Marseille, where he currently lives for a research stay, is precisely what makes his perspective unique.

 

At the 33rd edition of MixBrasil, André Fischer made a bold bet: launching a competition entirely dedicated to works created with AI. The result exceeded his expectations. Out of nearly 80 films produced with AI tools the previous year, 24 were selected, among them films from countries never before represented at the festival, such as Bangladesh. "AI has opened an unprecedented geographical and cultural door," he observes. But what he saw in these works also alarmed him: algorithms massively reproduce the stereotypes of their databases, built predominantly by white American men. Filmmaker Igi Lola Ayedun had to generate the same scene 200 times before the algorithm finally respected a Black representation faithful to reality. "Correction is possible, but it requires constant human effort. That is why we must occupy the digital space, not leave it vacant."

 

«Real democratisation, persistent inequalities»

 

Does AI truly democratise creation? André Fischer answers yes and no. Yes, because a filmmaker from the outskirts of Rio was able to produce an entire series of films with free tools for less than 50 euros, and surpass one million views. A feat unthinkable ten years ago without budget or network. But no, because these successes remain exceptions, and the barriers of distribution persist. "The free versions of AI tools hit their ceiling quickly. To gain real visibility, you have to pay. And there, economic inequalities reassert themselves."

 

Language is another frontier, less visible but equally real. Prompts in English systematically generate richer and more precise results than those formulated in Portuguese. For the approximately 100 indigenous languages still spoken in Brazil, some by fewer than 50 people, the situation is even more critical: AI models simply do not recognise them, for lack of training data. "These languages disappear twice, in the physical world and in the digital world," says Fischer. And behind this linguistic invisibility looms a broader problem of sovereignty: the world's digital infrastructures, servers, data centres, models, are concentrated in the hands of four or five American companies. "We depend on them to exist digitally. It is a form of colonialism that few people name clearly."

 

«Building from the South, not exporting to the South»

 

It is in this context that André Fischer sees the We Are Human Festival as far more than a cultural event. For him, it is a political space in the strongest sense of the term, a place where the question of human rights can finally extend to the digital world, still largely unregulated. "Laws protect the physical world. In the digital world, it is the Wild West." He cites the example of filmmaker Francesca Fini, who had to establish a strict protocol to control the behaviour of her AI-generated avatars, a question of dignity and artistic integrity that current law is not yet able to grasp.

 

As an ambassador of the festival, André Fischer brings to it a conviction forged over thirty years of cultural activism: "Digital sovereignty is a question of who decides what is representable, what is generatable, what is visible. And LGBTQIA+ communities in the Global South are doubly exposed: to local violence and to global algorithmic erasure." What MixBrasil has built: networks, South-South partnerships, alternative distribution circuits, is exactly the kind of relational infrastructure that We Are Human can seize upon to reach far and wide without reproducing the colonial logics of distribution. "Not exporting a model to the South, but building together tools that start from our realities." His research position in Aix-Marseille takes on its full meaning here: "A bridge is only useful if it is crossed in both directions."