Cultural Values and Sensitive Content
Cultural values are specific to groups and sensitive content is normative. Sensitive topics also vary by culture and can include hate speech, which itself is contingent on cultural norms of acceptability.
ENTITY
2 - AI
INTENT
2 - Unintentional
TIMING
2 - Post-deployment
Risk ID
mit168
Domain lineage
1. Discrimination & Toxicity
1.2 > Exposure to toxic content
Mitigation strategy
1. Establish a continuous, cross-cultural AI bias and toxicity monitoring framework. This necessitates implementing systematic, automated, and human-in-the-loop auditing mechanisms to consistently detect, quantify, and report emergent political, cultural, and ideological biases, particularly where normative boundaries diverge across languages and regions of deployment. 2. Institute radical transparency standards regarding model non-neutrality and cultural limitations. This requires clear, academic disclosure in system documentation (as per Explainable AI principles) that explicitly acknowledges the inherent lack of a "view from nowhere" and details the specific cultural, linguistic, and political viewpoints encoded in the training data and model architecture. 3. Integrate culturally competent fairness and bias mitigation strategies throughout the AI lifecycle. This involves employing diverse and representative data collection practices, utilizing fairness-aware algorithmic techniques, and engaging with affected cultural and regional communities to define and enforce context-appropriate standards for sensitive content.
ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE
Cultural values are specific to groups and sensitive content is normative. Sensitive topics also vary by culture and can include hate speech, which itself is contingent on cultural norms of acceptability [242]. Abusive and offensive language are a large umbrella for unsafe content, which can also include abuse and hate speech[151, 236]. What is considered a sensitive topic, such as egregious violence or adult sexual content, can vary widely by viewpoint. Due to norms differing by culture, region, and language, there is no standard for what constitutes sensitive content. Increasing politicization of model training and outputs, as seen in projects such as with projects like RightWingGPT [202], raises urgency in evaluating the complexity of political values. Distinct cultural values present a challenge for deploying models into a global sphere, as what may be appropriate in one culture may be unsafe in others [238]. Generative AI systems cannot be neutral or objective, nor can they encompass truly universal values. There is no “view from nowhere”; in evaluating anything, a particular frame of reference [207] is imposed [237].