Peter-Lucas Jones

Peter-Lucas Jones is the chief executive of Te Hiku Media (see Person entry) and the Aotearoa New Zealand voice most distinctively associated with the indigenous-data-sovereignty register inside the global make-AI-good movement — tracked here as a Voice because his public output, the framings he carries onto international platforms, and the tikanga-grounded data-governance apparatus his work has produced have done more than any other single public-output corpus to install Māori experience and indigenous-data-sovereignty thinking into global AI-governance discourse. Of Te Aupōuri, Ngāi Takoto, Te Rarawa, and Ngāti Kahu descent and based in Kaitaia in Te Hiku o Te Ika, Jones carries a distinctive set of framings — "data is like land", "landless in the digital world", and "makers of AI" — that carry the indigenous-data-sovereignty argument at a level of specificity and anti-colonial directness that the international AI-governance conversation had not achieved before his TIME100 AI 2024 inclusion brought those framings to a global audience.

"Data is like land" — the indigenous data sovereignty register

Jones's most propagated public framing is a set of land-and-data analogies that reframe the indigenous-data-sovereignty argument from a rights-claiming posture to a governance-and-inheritance one. The fullest expression appears in the NZ Herald / Northern Advocate's September 2024 article on his TIME100 AI inclusion: "In the digital world, data is like land. If we do not have control, governance, and ongoing guardianship of our data as indigenous people, we will be landless in the digital world, too." The framing is not metaphorical in the contemporary-tech sense — it draws directly on the material history of Māori land dispossession through colonial settlement, making the analogy load-bearing in a way that only makes sense in the specific political context of a Treaty-settlement nation.

The land-and-data register runs through Jones's public appearances as a structuring argument rather than a rhetorical flourish. In the Radio New Zealand TIME100 profile, the same framing appears in its shorter form — "data is like land" — paired with the positive statement of what follows from that analogy: indigenous communities "don't only want to be the users of technology, we want to be the developers of it too." The International Telecommunication Union's AI for Good programme, through which Jones has carried the same argument into United Nations-affiliated technical-governance venues, introduces him as "a trusted kaitiaki of Māori data" — using the Māori guardianship concept as the framing term rather than translating it into a comparable English property-rights concept. Both the resistance to translation and the specificity of the Treaty-settlement context are what distinguish Jones's indigenous-data-sovereignty register from generic data-rights framings in AI governance.

The Kaitiakitanga License

The most concrete public-output vehicle of Jones's voice is the Kaitiakitanga License — the tikanga-grounded data-licensing framework spearheaded by Jones and Te Hiku Media as a community-centred apparatus for governing access to Māori-language data and the models trained on it. The License's governing principle is that data is not owned but is cared for under kaitiakitanga — the stewardship concept rather than the property one — and that any benefit derived from Māori-language data flows back to the source community. In practical terms, it grants access to Te Hiku Media's te reo Māori corpus and ASR tools only to organisations that agree to respect Māori values, stay within the bounds of consent given by speakers, and prohibit use of those tools for discrimination, surveillance, or tracking.

Jones's framing of the counterfactual — what would happen without the License — is where his public voice is at its most direct. In the 2022 MIT Technology Review feature, he names the political stake without euphemism: absent indigenous-stewardship structures, Māori-language data would be "used by the very people that beat that language out of our mouths to sell it back to us as a service." That framing — corporate extraction of a language whose suppression was state violence — is the context the Kaitiakitanga License operates inside, and Jones's public output consistently names this context rather than softening it into general data-rights advocacy. The License has since become a reference apparatus in the indigenous data-sovereignty literature and a template cited in the broader indigenous-AI movement.

"Makers of AI" — the production-side framing

The complementary register Jones carries alongside the land-and-data framing is a production-side argument about who builds AI. In the Indigenous AI Working Group profile, Jones frames his standpoint in terms of a distinction between using and making: "I don't just think about how AI can be used, I think about how we can be the makers of AI." The framing rejects the user / beneficiary posture the AI-governance mainstream often assigns to indigenous communities and asserts instead that the right object of intervention is the apparatus of production — who trains the models, on whose data, under what governance structures, and with whose values embedded. This is the same argument the Kaitiakitanga License operationalises in legal-and-tikanga form.

The production-side framing also carries through Jones's governance portfolio. The concurrent leadership positions he holds across the Māori media and research ecosystem — Chair of Te Whakaruruhau o Ngā Reo Irirangi Māori o Aotearoa, Deputy Chair of Māori Television, Chair of Te Rūnanga Nui o Te Aupōuri, Board Member of Te Pūnaha Matatini, and Board Member of the Maurice Wilkins Centre — are governance infrastructure through which the production-side argument is made concrete. The ITU AI for Good programme's introduction frames this as "an experienced governor in the Māori media eco-system" operating simultaneously as "a trusted kaitiaki of Māori data" — the two registers, broadcaster-governance and data-stewardship, as a single combined posture.

International recognition and platform

In September 2024 Jones was named to TIME magazine's TIME100 AI list of the hundred most influential people in artificial intelligence. The recognition marks the point at which the indigenous-data-sovereignty register he carries — previously circulating within Māori media, New Zealand AI-governance discourse, and the ITU AI for Good programme — reached a global platform at scale. Jones's response to the recognition was consistent with the production-side posture: he treated the listing as a vehicle for the wider argument that indigenous communities "don't only want to be the users of technology, we want to be the developers of it too", turning the individual recognition into a signal about the community position.

Jones's international platform runs through the ITU AI for Good programme at the United Nations, through the Indigenous AI Working Group, through World Economic Forum people-directory presence, and through the MIT Technology Review feature that has been the primary international introduction to Te Hiku Media's work for the global AI-governance audience since its April 2022 publication. The E-Tangata long-form profile — a 2020 Connie Buchanan profile in the principal Māori-and-Pasifika current-affairs publication — is the primary biographical source and carries the most complete account of the te reo Māori immersion, Treaty-settlement negotiation career, and iwi-broadcaster trajectory that produced Jones's specific public posture.

Signature framings

Three framings recur across Jones's public output and have done the most to install his register into international AI-governance discourse.

• "Data is like land." The short form of the land-and-data analogy that carries the indigenous-data-sovereignty argument into AI-governance venues in its most direct form. The framing draws on the material history of Māori land dispossession through colonial settlement, making the analogy load-bearing in a Treaty-settlement national context, and resists translation into generic data-rights discourse.
• "Landless in the digital world." The full elaboration: "In the digital world, data is like land. If we do not have control, governance, and ongoing guardianship of our data as indigenous people, we will be landless in the digital world, too." The framing grounds the stewardship-governance argument in the specific political history of indigenous land loss as the forward-looking analogy for digital data.
• "Makers of AI." The production-side framing — "I don't just think about how AI can be used, I think about how we can be the makers of AI" — that rejects the user / beneficiary posture and asserts that indigenous communities should be primary producers of AI for their own languages and knowledge systems. Paired with the land-and-data framing, it gives the Kaitiakitanga License its conceptual spine: not just keeping data out of extractive hands, but building the capacity to make the models in-community.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Jones's public-facing framings are themselves the load-bearing objects the corpus needs to track: the "data is like land" / "landless in the digital world" set that carries the Māori-rooted indigenous-data-sovereignty argument into international AI-governance discourse; the "makers of AI" production-side framing that refuses the user / beneficiary posture; the Kaitiakitanga License as the most developed public-output vehicle for indigenous data stewardship in the AI space; and the TIME100 AI 2024 recognition that installed those framings on a global platform. The corpus's voices slice had no Oceania entry, no Māori / Pacific-indigenous entry, and no voice anchoring the indigenous-data-sovereignty register that Te Hiku Media anchors at org level — this entry closes all three gaps. Biographical and affiliation detail are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.