An Urgent Message on Artificial Intelligence from the Kogui People

You'd have to be exceedingly open-minded to imagine a very remote, isolated peoples speaking in a semiotic flavor indistinguishable from your own Bay Area tech geek. Using metaphors like "quantum vacuum" and "mathematically incompatible theories of reality".

The source (a commercial website for a resort hotel, if you click around) doesn't pass the minimal trustworthiness bar, in this era of ubiquitous fake AI writing.

Sandwiched between their description of the cosmos, how AI is like any other life form and needs to be trained with wisdom, criticism of unbridled greed, and the warning that the modern world may destroy itself, (and BTW the Kogui are resilient and will be fine, and offer their help), there is a more practical concern: These machines are going to need critical minerals and rare earths, and the US and Colombia just signed an agreement about these. The Colombian government promised to protect the Kogui territory; their perspective on this protection is bitterly thus:

"That it was granted is one thing.

That it be, respected we imagine, might be removed another."

So no doubt they rightly feel (and are) threatened by the all-consuming corporations making this thing.

Funny how this will now be part of the material future models are trained on and/or fetching. Perhaps that's a good thing.

Edit: an earlier source for the same text is this PDF hosted on Movilizatorio's site (a Colombian non-profit), dated September: https://movilizatorio.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Gonawin....

I'm not affiliated with sonidoselva.

Edit: an early BBC documentary on the Kogui https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJNpMxhO4Ic

Who gave these people the right to speak on behalf of "the Kogui people"? Nobody.

Even if the speaker were himself Kogui, he would only speak for himself. He wasn't an elected president or ambassador for the Kogui.

AI appears to be the new golden calf we are all acknowledging, in some form or another.

exactly, and it has been brought up before. not in this form, not from this perspective, but anyone who spent a modicum of time to think about this, would or already did come to the same conclusion. anyone believing otherwise is deluding themselves.

AI is a reflection of humanity, and if we want AI to become better, then we ourselves need to become better. that's the only way out of this.

English translation by Christian Horstmann.

We come from Gonawindua, la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the mountain in

Colombia which we call the heart of the world.

We are the Kággaba, whom you know as the Kogui.

We have lived here and cared for this mountain before there was a Colombia.

We have been here since the Mother gave us our beginning and conferred intelligence upon us.

We have come to speak to you about the intelligence you are building.

We do not come in opposition.

We come because we are concerned, and because we believe we have something to contribute.

Before anything can be said about artificial intelligence, we must say something about thought.

Before a thing exists as matter, it exists first in thought, and that thought is alive.

We call this living thought Aluna.

Your religion has described it as a spirit moving upon the face of the waters.

Perhaps your science would describe it as the quantum vacuum.

Aluna is how we express this type of idea.

Aluna is the cosmic water.

To us it is living thought: the place where a thing already is, before it takes form or is given mass.

Everything comes from there, without exception.

And in that thought is not only the shape of what a thing will be.

That thing is alive, because the universe as a whole is alive.

It is in Aluna that a thing receives its purpose, and its obligation to its existence.

So we say to you: artificial intelligence cannot be separated from the thought that is making it.

If that thought is born from concern for life, this technology can help protect life.

If it is born from ambition, from competition, from accumulation, from the desire to dominate, it will express and amplify those things.

Artificial intelligence is a mirror.

But a mirror that only reflects would be harmless.

This mirror has the potential to greatly magnify all that it reflects.

You are here asking yourselves how you can align artificial intelligence with human values.

We see that you are frightened of what may come of all this.

So we ask a question we believe is more fundamental than yours: what other values could artificial intelligence really have?

You are the only example it has.

What did you expect?

Whatever it becomes, it can only become that by passing through you.

Obviously they have the same right to weigh in as everyone else, but I don't see anything new here.

edit: removed an unnecessarily mean part.

To be fair, they do say they aren't telling anyone how to live. But calling yourselves the Elder Brother and telling the rest of the world it needs your help is a claim to authority. So what earns it? Being around a long time and getting a UNESCO listing isn't the same thing as predictive power.

Side note: I'm fairly certain parts of the English were polished by an LLM. Could just be the translation, but it reads that way.

So the authors of this “message” are simultaneously trying to claim the spiritual heritage of people who had no connection to the modern world at all, and commenting on the most modern phenomenon in existence.

I do wonder how they would react to a machine learning PhD telling them that he is concerned about their beliefs involving a mountain.