(2025) 6 TWAIL Review 188–221
ISSN 2563-6693
Published under a Creative Commons licence. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly promoted as having magical properties, evoking illusory claims of self-generating, supernatural technologies. Critical academics and activists explain that allusions to magic obscure developer responsibility for direct and indirect consequences of their new technologies. This rhetorical appeal to magical-scientific properties has been called “enchanted determinism”. The enchanted determinism critique highlights how claims to magic are used strategically to avoid legal or moral responsibility. Magical framing of these technologies makes any accompanying violent outcomes appear uncontrollable and inevitable. In contrast and throughout contemporary history, rhetorical appeals to magic have been levelled at people and communities as a means to justify legal repression, dispossession, and colonial conquest and expansion. Why then would rhetorical appeals to magic be helpful in the AI context where they have so often otherwise justified dispossession, exploitation, and enslavement? We contend that this incongruity is bridged by a common function of enchanted discourse: to obscure imperial policy, to justify colonial actions, and to Other and dehumanize the people and land needed to maintain economic and political dominance. In other words, hegemonic claims of ‘magic’ follow a common rhetorical thread linking historical and ongoing colonial processes through the obfuscation that accompanies the incomprehensible. We hope that making this connection more discernible can further demystify international processes that might lead to legal governance to restrain the growth of an imperial industry.