Whose Knowledge Counts? Co-Designing Community-Centered AI Auditing Tools with Educators in Hawai`i
This work addresses the issue of AI bias and cultural harm for educators and Indigenous communities in low-resource language settings, offering a novel approach to auditing that is incremental in applying co-design methods to this specific context.
The study tackled the problem of cultural misrepresentation and bias in generative AI tools used in classrooms, particularly in Indigenous education settings like Hawai`i, by co-designing community-centered AI auditing tools with educators, resulting in designs grounded in Hawaiian cultural values such as tracing knowledge genealogy.
Although generative AI is being deployed into classrooms with promises of aiding teachers, educators caution that these tools can have unintended pedagogical repercussions, including cultural misrepresentation and bias. These concerns are heightened in low-resource language and Indigenous education settings, where AI systems frequently underperform. We investigate these challenges in Hawai`i, where public schools operate under a statewide mandate to integrate Hawaiian language and culture into education. Through four co-design workshops with 22 public school educators, we surfaced concerns about using generative AI in educational settings, particularly around cultural misrepresentation, and corresponding designs for auditing tools that address these issues. We find that educators envision tools grounded in specific Hawaiian cultural values and practices, such as tracing the genealogy of knowledge in source materials. Building on these insights, we conceptualize AI auditing as a community-oriented process rather than the work of isolated individuals, and discuss implications for designing auditing tools.