This Artist Says AI Exposes the Colonialism We Still Carry

For Hassan Ragab, the memory of seeing a mummy exhibited at a museum was lasting and unsettling. The concept of seeing a body on display became a symptom of a greater reckoning on culture, identity and the lingering effects of colonialism on Egyptian society.

“You look at these as objects, but they’re not,” the interdisciplinary artist and architect shared with me days before the Forever is Now contemporary arts exhibition in 2024, where he became the first artist to display AI-generated work at the Great Pyramids of Giza. The video featured a series of contemporary explorations of ancient Egyptian identity, including a scene of a young shirtless man wrapped in a shroud like a mummy – placed on display as onlookers stopped to photograph him – in a critique on the dynamics between mummies and viewers that Ragab had noticed.

“I realised that there’s a huge gap between us understanding our past, or our identity, as we’re looking at it from a very materialistic, analytical point,” he says. “I think this has roots in colonisation and basically who introduced that history to us.”

Egyptology was formalised by French scholar Jean-François Champollion for European audiences. He framed the history of ancient Egypt through a European scholarly lens in which a divide between ancient and modern Egypt elevated the pharaonic civilisation as a pinnacle of lost greatness while portraying contemporary Egypt as disconnected.

“To break down an identity, you go to a place and you tell people, ‘You’re stupid, you’re wrong, whatever you’re doing is wrong,’” Ragab tells WIRED Middle East.

“You do this for generations, and the native people will believe that it’s true.”

When I first spoke with Ragab, his work was centred on filling a colonial-induced gap in Egyptian identity and history. A year later, his perspective and reason for his work has changed. “My work comes from a point of nihilism,” he says. “I have a good knowledge of what will trigger people to react, and right now my work is really not about triggering people. It’s just about me saying what I want to say.”

Now, the Alexandria-born, California-based artist uses AI to create visuals depicting urban Egyptian life with motifs from its history. “My work transformed from challenging bias in the models to trying to understand the world through the bias of large language models,” he explains, noting how in analysing the bias in models, he sees the technology allowing others to understand the bias within themselves.

Ragab has noticed feedback loops in which a stereotype is already common, but becomes even more amplified and hyper-reflected through AI. Look no further than a simple ChatGPT prompt: “What is Egypt like?” which returns a familiar refrain drawing from traditional colonial Egyptology: “Egypt is a place of contrasts – ancient and modern…” Generative AI, which draws from existing content, can reinforce existing biases – especially if they are prevalent globally. His work arrives as generative AI use is at an all-time high; OpenAI estimated 700 million weekly active users of ChatGPT in September 2025. An average of 34 million AI-generated images are created daily across AI tools.