When I began searching for visual traces of my family genealogical journey in digital archives, one of the first collections I came across was Gertrude Bell’s. She is a renowned British explorer who traveled extensively across the Middle East alongside Lawrence of Arabia, documenting the region through photographs. I decided to run her images through an object detection model, curious to see how the AI would interpret them. The results, however, were odd and revealing. For example, this image tagged a Bedouin figure as a “Samurai.” Many other images were tagged with militaristic terms, reflecting how machine learning models—trained on contemporary media language—tend to associate Arab regions with conflict. The AI models also frequently applied Western cultural labels or generalized photos into south asian categories, revealing a Western-centric worldview that flattens cultural nuance and misunderstands regional identities.