Designing AI to Be Culturally Inclusive Will Take Time and Patience from the Industry

We, as human beings, are still feeling our way through the new world of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Even though the field has been around for some time, its philosophical underpinnings are still in a nascent stage. Perhaps it is worthwhile to remember something the late Stephen Hawking once said, “We should shift the goal of AI from creating pure undirected artificial intelligence to creating beneficial intelligence. It might take decades to figure out how to do this, so let’s start researching this today.”
We believe, effective fusion of AI, culture, and storytelling will help diminish bias in algorithmic identification and train AI software to be much more inclusive and we are asking you to help us explore the possibilities. We are sharing our early approach here and looking for your feedback.

AI is being used more and more to drive interactive and timely content. The New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press all rely on machines to help meet our ever growing appetite for on-demand content. Yet, the data that drives our narratives represents only a fraction of our story.

Today, world cultures, history, and traditions are being left out of the narrative, research, and datasets. We need systems that empower communities to participate in the emerging digital narrative. AI story narration is the craft of making machines learn human storytelling techniques.

Several groundbreaking works on AI, culture, and storytelling prove that such an endeavor is possible and critical, including the works of Rafael Pérez y Pérez’s MEXICA project; Boyang “Albert” Li and Mark Riedl on The Scheherazade System; Mark Finlayson annotating a corpus of Russian folktales; Wolfgang Victor Yarlott’s Old Man Coyote Stories, and D. Fox Harrell’s Imagination, Computation and Expression Laboratory.

At IVOW, we have been seeking advice from several AI experts as we develop our prototype focusing on images and extended captions. It’s important to note that we are an early stage startup but confident that together with our partners and advisors we can incorporate cultural data into future automated stories. Read the full story here.