An AI anthropologist studies artificial intelligence systems through anthropological methods and, in turn, uses AI to extend anthropological research. The practice is bidirectional: it applies ethnographic, cultural, and social analysis to understand how AI systems are designed, deployed, and experienced, while also building AI tools that embody anthropological knowledge. AI anthropology treats AI not as an external object of study but as a domain where cultural and computational processes are inseparable.
The field is emerging at a moment when large language models, knowledge graphs, and recommender systems are reshaping how knowledge is produced, circulated, and consumed. AI anthropologists examine these systems as cultural artifacts, asking what values they encode, whose knowledge they draw on, and what they make visible or invisible. At the same time, they build anthropologically informed AI tools, from research toolkits to neuro-symbolic architectures, that embed ethnographic reasoning into computational systems.
Matt Artz has called for the development of AI Anthropology as a field in publications including General Anthropology and Anthropological Forum. His PhD dissertation at Aalborg University is titled Toward an AI Anthropology, and his work includes the Anthropological Knowledge Graph (AKG), the AI Anthropology Toolkit, and the Gamified Participatory Recommender System patent.