AI

AI research and development disproportionately benefit the Global North. The socio-cultural differences between highly studied countries within the Anglophone West, and the diverse countries across the rest of the world means that systems and knowledge derived in the former could lead to unintended negative consequences when blindly applied in the latter.

There are objects, ideas and aspects of lived experience entirely absent in LLM training data. Moreover, generalised approaches to values alignment are based on the cultures and incentive structures most relevant to those creating the technologies. These dataset gaps and value misalignments can make AI models a poor fit for use cases and communities across the rest of the world. For instance, if value priorities like group decision-making or inter-relational responsibility are not supported by AI technologies, or if physical circumstances, local philosophies or ways of life are invisible to generative models, then cross-cultural implementation can result in inappropriate, unhelpful, harmful, controlling, imperialist, mistrusted, and/or rejected services. Yet, given the lack of resources for health systems across many countries the potential for improved access to health services at a lower cost via technology can not be ignored. Indeed, if these cross-culural issues can be addressed, appropriate application of generative AI for health within low-resourced contexts could have especially high impact.

Therefore, this project aims to explore and identify the opportunities, and address the challenges, of applying conversational AI to health contexts within Latin America. To achieve these positive impacts, it is crucial to approach innovation in a way that is contextually-informed, culturally-meaningful, driven by local needs and attentive to pre-empting, mitigating, and monitoring any potential negative impacts to individuals, family/social values, or community. We are a cross-country and cross-cultural team of AI researchers, developers, health researchers and human-computer interaction designers dedicated to working directly with stakeholders and communities to harness the benefits of AI for world health.