Inclusive AI
Inclusive AI for Social and Planetary Wellbeing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping how we live, work, and imagine our collective futures. While it holds immense promise for tackling pressing global challenges, it also risks deepening existing inequities and environmental harms. Our group works to ensure that AI becomes a tool for social and planetary wellbeing. We focus especially on underrepresented contexts, conditions, and cultures, with a special focus on the Global South. This region holds the majority of the world’s youth and where AI innovation is grounded in underrepresented local realities, knowledge systems, and aspirations.
By bridging disciplines and sectors, we help build inclusive and sustainable AI data, tools, services, and platforms that prioritize chronically neglected communities, cultures and contexts.
From WEIRD societies to the Majority World
Current AI systems are overwhelmingly trained on datasets representing WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) societies. Data sources remain dominated by Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, heterosexual, and white demographics, leaving out the lived experiences of the Global South. This lack of diversity not only produces biased outputs but risks reinforcing systemic exclusions, marginalizing the very groups that AI should be serving. Furthermore, the environmental impact of AI training, data infrastructures, and extractive resource dependencies raise urgent questions about the sustainability of current AI practices.
Our Approach: Data CARE
At the core of our work is the Data CARE Approach, which guides our projects. Rooted in the CARE Principles—Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics—this approach directly addresses barriers to equitable AI development and deployment. Rather than stopping at critique, we emphasize hope-driven action, co-developing strategies that prioritize representation, attribution, ownership, and value for communities most often neglected by AI systems. By uniting thought leaders from academia, technology, civic society, and policy, the Data CARE approach fosters collaborative innovation and builds momentum for inclusive AI futures that put both people and the planet first.
Our Clusters
Our five research clusters tackle the most urgent dimensions of inclusive AI: Sustainable AI connects responsible innovation with local entrepreneurship and sustainability practices; Creative AI diversifies datasets, systems, and outputs by centering Global South voices in creative production; Cross-Cultural AI Ethics maps narrative gaps and fosters intercultural dialogue to design AI that respects diverse values; Feminist AI builds gender-sensitive systems through a worker-centered, activist-informed approach; and Responsible AI advances data literacy and co-design, ensuring AI models are locally grounded yet globally scalable. Together, these clusters translate theory into practice, bridging social justice with planetary wellbeing.
From Insights to Impact
Through our Data CARE Workshop Series, Inclusive AI Podcast, newsletters, and Reclaiming Techno-Optimism reports, we move beyond critique to generate actionable pathways for inclusive and responsible AI.
