Western AI installs values
(MENAFN) As generative AI spreads across the Global South, it increasingly serves as a subtle tool of Western influence, embedding foreign ideologies and infrastructure while sidelining local knowledge systems, languages, and traditions.
These AI systems are born in the West—built, trained, and guided by values shaped in places like Silicon Valley and elite American universities. Their language is English, their worldview is Western, and their moral frameworks are rooted in secular liberalism. When a chatbot built in California starts teaching in Ghana or offering medical advice in Bangladesh, it does more than answer questions—it propagates a particular way of thinking.
The systems privilege Western philosophers, science developed under patent protections, and cultural references familiar to elite institutions in the U.S. They quote Freud instead of Avicenna, and Shakespeare over Tagore. Their “helpfulness” is a vehicle for influence, subtly shaping education, public policy, and governance across continents. Every interaction becomes training data, feeding back into the machine and reinforcing its worldview.
This AI presence arrives under the guise of neutrality—promoted as inclusive, bias-aware, and globally relevant. But in practice, it promotes secularism, Western gender norms, and individualism as universal truths. A student in Nigeria asking about family will get advice rooted in New York sociology; a youth in Kazakhstan inquiring about love is handed narratives crafted by American pop culture.
Despite being offered as tools for empowerment, these systems create asymmetry: data flows from the Global South to servers in the U.S., and influence flows in the opposite direction. What starts as technological aid quietly becomes cultural infrastructure.
While local engineers and institutions begin to push for AI rooted in regional languages and traditions, the dominance of Western-built models continues to reinforce a one-way exchange—installing foreign logic into domestic life, with long-term implications for cultural sovereignty and intellectual independence.
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