Designing Culturally Aligned AI Systems For Social Good in Non-Western Contexts

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Main Authors: Dennison, Deepak Varuvel, Jain, Mohit, Ganu, Tanuja, Vashistha, Aditya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dennison, Deepak Varuvel
Jain, Mohit
Ganu, Tanuja
Vashistha, Aditya
author_facet Dennison, Deepak Varuvel
Jain, Mohit
Ganu, Tanuja
Vashistha, Aditya
contents AI technologies are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as education, healthcare, law, and agriculture to address complex challenges in non-Western contexts. This paper examines eight real-world deployments spanning seven countries and 18 languages, combining 17 interviews with AI developers and domain experts with secondary research. Our findings identify six cross-cutting factors - Language, Institution, Safety, Task, End-User Demography, and Domain - that structured how systems were designed and deployed. These factors were shaped by Sociocultural (diversity, practices), Institutional (resources, policies), and Technological (capabilities, limits) influences. We find that building effective AI systems required extensive collaboration between AI developers and domain experts, with human resources proving more critical to achieving safe and effective outcomes in high-stakes domains than technological expertise alone. Additionally, we present 12 guidelines synthesizing these dynamics for designing AI for social good systems that are culturally grounded, equitable, and responsive to the needs of non-Western contexts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_16158
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Designing Culturally Aligned AI Systems For Social Good in Non-Western Contexts
Dennison, Deepak Varuvel
Jain, Mohit
Ganu, Tanuja
Vashistha, Aditya
Human-Computer Interaction
AI technologies are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as education, healthcare, law, and agriculture to address complex challenges in non-Western contexts. This paper examines eight real-world deployments spanning seven countries and 18 languages, combining 17 interviews with AI developers and domain experts with secondary research. Our findings identify six cross-cutting factors - Language, Institution, Safety, Task, End-User Demography, and Domain - that structured how systems were designed and deployed. These factors were shaped by Sociocultural (diversity, practices), Institutional (resources, policies), and Technological (capabilities, limits) influences. We find that building effective AI systems required extensive collaboration between AI developers and domain experts, with human resources proving more critical to achieving safe and effective outcomes in high-stakes domains than technological expertise alone. Additionally, we present 12 guidelines synthesizing these dynamics for designing AI for social good systems that are culturally grounded, equitable, and responsive to the needs of non-Western contexts.
title Designing Culturally Aligned AI Systems For Social Good in Non-Western Contexts
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16158