Empowerment or warfare? dark skin, AI camera, and Transsion’s patent narratives

ABSTRACT Through document analysis and interviews, this paper examines the patent narratives of Transsion, a Chinese company dominating Africa’s smartphone market and a leading innovator in facial recognition technologies (FRTs) optimized for darker skin tones. We identify two major narratives concerning Transsion’s FRT patenting practice. First is ‘empowerment’, through which Transsion argues that there are ‘blind spots’ in conventional AI technologies and presents its AI camera as a remedy and an empowerment tool for dark-skinned users by ‘seeing’ their beauty. Second is the ‘warfare’ narrative, which is shaped by the heightening market competition and accelerating patent races among Chinese phone makers. As the battle for tech supremacy intensifies in Africa, Transsion expresses a strong sense of crisis and considers its FRT patents as ‘weapons of competition’ in preparation for a future smartphone warfare in Africa. This study makes two contributions. Empirically, through analyzing patents, we examine a relatively less-known Chinese tech company that has tremendous impact in the Global South. Theoretically, we interrogate the possibility of algorithmic empowerment against racist AI and technological independence through patents, although developing AI as weaponry, in the China-Africa context, also hampers the politics of decolonization.