Cultural Incongruencies in Artificial Intelligence
This highlights a critical problem for global AI deployment, as cultural biases can limit effectiveness and fairness, though it is an incremental position paper rather than a novel solution.
The paper identifies that AI systems, particularly in language and vision, often fail to account for cultural diversity in their design and training data, leading to incongruencies when deployed globally, and proposes strategies to address these issues.
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems attempt to imitate human behavior. How well they do this imitation is often used to assess their utility and to attribute human-like (or artificial) intelligence to them. However, most work on AI refers to and relies on human intelligence without accounting for the fact that human behavior is inherently shaped by the cultural contexts they are embedded in, the values and beliefs they hold, and the social practices they follow. Additionally, since AI technologies are mostly conceived and developed in just a handful of countries, they embed the cultural values and practices of these countries. Similarly, the data that is used to train the models also fails to equitably represent global cultural diversity. Problems therefore arise when these technologies interact with globally diverse societies and cultures, with different values and interpretive practices. In this position paper, we describe a set of cultural dependencies and incongruencies in the context of AI-based language and vision technologies, and reflect on the possibilities of and potential strategies towards addressing these incongruencies.