Digital Redface
The use of technology, especially generative AI, to imitate or stand in for Indigenous people, languages, or cultures without their involvement, usually producing crude, inauthentic, or simply wrong results. The term draws on "redface," the practice of non-Native people caricaturing Native identity (akin to blackface), and applies it to digital impersonation.
It shows up when a model is prompted to generate text in an Indigenous language it barely represents and returns fluent-looking nonsense (see Ojibwe Chat), when image generators produce stereotyped "Native" imagery, or when non-speakers use AI to mass-produce language materials. It is a specific form of misrepresentation, and because the output is often confident and plausible to outsiders, it doubles as misinformation: it can be taken for the real language or culture by people who cannot tell the difference.