The developing world’s enthusiastic adoption of AI and necessity-driven innovations offer lessons for an anxiety-ridden West.
Payal Arora is a professor and chair in Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and founder of the Inclusive AI Lab.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, I was invited to debate AI’s impact on the cultural sector alongside Dutch politicians and creative-industry leaders. I was the lone optimist, arguing that if fear and risk become our primary lens for governing artificial intelligence, we will design systems around what we want to prevent rather than what we want to use them for. Then I said something that was harder for the room to hear: The Global South is home to some of AI’s most enthusiastic and inventive users, and their experiments could help us rethink our own institutions.
In the West, fear of AI has helped turn pessimism into a cultural virtue.
The U.S. is no different from Europe. A culture of fear encourages protectionism: We hunker down and romanticize legacy systems rather than ask what might replace them. Creative industries in the majority world have spent decades navigating piracy and weak enforcement, forcing them to think beyond rights-based policing about how creators actually receive value. Anghami, the biggest music app in the Middle East, for instance, pays musicians from their first stream, rather than only after a song reaches a minimum threshold. It has approached AI pragmatically, using it to curate, tag, and attribute creative work rather than simply blocking and banning.
In the West, fear of AI has helped turn pessimism into a cultural virtue.
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