As the global conversation around AI accelerates, it is increasingly clear that the voices and knowledge systems of the Global South are still underrepresented in both data and design. To address this gap, An AI of Our Own (AAOO), an initiative by Living Arts International, launched a landmark research effort in June 2024, following the development of the initial concept note, to map the landscape of digital heritage projects across Africa and Asia. This initiative was a foundational step in building a diverse and action-oriented consortium dedicated to ethical, community-centered AI that truly reflects the world's diverse cultures.
Understanding the Landscape
This internal mapping project set out to explore how cultural heritage is being digitized in Asia and Africa, who the leading voices are in tech and cultural advocacy, and where ethical considerations in AI are being most urgently addressed. The findings, drawn from a review of over 90 projects and interviews with 23 experts, reveal both promising innovations and urgent challenges.
Key insights include:
- A heavy focus on static digital repositories: While more than half of the projects studied were centered around digitization and archives, few embraced truly participatory or AI-integrated approaches.
- Low adoption of AI in heritage spaces: There is limited direct use of AI technologies in digital heritage initiatives, though interest is growing.
- Community involvement is uneven: While many projects aim to be community-focused, few offer meaningful participation in decision-making or ownership.
- Documentation still dominates: Most initiatives rely on traditional archiving methods, with only a handful experimenting with storytelling, interactivity, or non-textual knowledge systems.
What Makes AAOO Different?
AAOO is not another digital archive. It is a bold reimagining of how AI can be shaped with and by communities to preserve, extend, and re-energize cultural heritage. Unlike conventional efforts that adapt heritage to fit existing technologies, AAOO seeks to build technology that adapts to heritage, especially the oral, relational, and non-Western ways of knowing prevalent across the Global South.
The mapping confirmed that while other efforts touch on similar themes like ethical data governance, Indigenous-led AI, or local language models, no existing initiative offers AAOO's combination of scope, values, and collaborative vision. This underscores the timeliness and urgency of the AAOO approach.
From Challenges to Possibilities
The research also exposed key challenges that AAOO must navigate, including:
- Data governance: Who owns cultural data, and how is consent obtained and maintained?
- End-use relevance: How can AI tools be directly useful to the communities contributing data?
- Sustainability: What models ensure long-term impact while minimizing environmental costs?
- Epistemic bias: How do we move beyond Western frameworks to build AI that honors oral traditions, lived experience, and collective knowledge?
AAOO's response to these challenges is guided by practical principles: co-creation, flexibility, pluralism, and deep community engagement. It draws inspiration from projects like Te Hiku Media's Māori data sovereignty efforts, Indigenous AI design philosophies, and African-led initiatives such as Masakhane and Awarri.
The Road Ahead
This mapping project set the stage for the Manifesto, as it identified the need for the project to clearly define what community-centered and ethical AI meant in its own context and to provide a baseline against which to compare and evaluate projects. Following the completion of the report, a working group was gathered, and the work on the manifesto began (released in April 2025).
Ultimately, the report clearly shows that we must not only build ethical AI, but we must reimagine AI entirely as a tool for cultural renewal, relational intelligence, and epistemic justice.
Read the full Landscape Mapping Report here
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