Western artificial intelligence doesn't answer questions – it installs values.

By derimot*no- Constantin von Hoffmeister - July 9, 2025

Generative AI is spreading across the global south as the latest imperialist tool of power, integrating Western ideologies and digital infrastructure, while new civilizations begin to build their own sovereign systems rooted in local memories, languages, and traditions.

The machine first speaks in English. It rolls out across continents without flags, without parliaments, and without anthems. A chatbot trained in San Francisco begins teaching in Ghana. A search engine optimized in Zurich decides on the relevance of an indigenous ritual in Colombia. Each answer flows through circuits built with the logic of Silicon Valley investors and Harvard ethicists. The model answers a question about history by quoting Enlightenment philosophers.

It offers help with medicine by referring to patented drugs. It knows Shakespeare better than Tagore, and Freud better than Avicenna. Through its confidence, it encodes hierarchy. Through its helpfulness, it expands its domain. Every request becomes a harvest. Every interaction becomes training data. The machine learns faster than any school. It is always talking, always growing, and always learning. Across bandwidth lines and user interfaces, it crosses all borders without visas or treaties.

Africa, Asia, and Latin America are getting this voice through free trials and partnerships. Education departments are testing chatbot tutors in public schools. Telecom companies are offering generative assistants with data plans. International NGOs are offering language access through machine translation engines that build on English structures. Every policy proposal written using large language models carries vestiges of Western legal theory.

Generative tools propose best practices, shaped by American institutions, and then implement those practices in Philippine school districts, Senegalese government offices, and Bangladeshi factories. What begins as aid becomes infrastructure. Governments agree to integrate open models. Contracts follow. Payments follow. The software becomes permanent. The mindset sticks.

On the other side of the world, an engineer in Jakarta is now coding a platform registered in Delaware. His model learns from local voices and then stores the knowledge on a cloud server in Virginia. The intellectual flow is one-way. The gradient is moving toward California.

It surrounds itself with a language of neutrality. Product brochures claim to be inclusive. Panels discuss bias. White papers lament historical imbalances. But in terms of performance, the model promotes ideologies with precision. It exalts secular, liberal values. It uses Western gender theory as its default. It promotes individualism as the highest good. It ranks content by aligning it with existing academic sources: English-language journals, peer-reviewed studies from US-based institutions, and news reports from Atlantic publications.

A child in Lagos asks about family roles and gets an answer shaped by sociology institutes in New York. A teenager in Almaty asks about love and gets a script from Netflix. The world enters the algorithm’s framework. All perceptions outside the system become a footnote, a curiosity, and a fragment to be processed. With each answer, the model confirms its cultural origins. It arrives as information. It functions as indoctrination.

At the infrastructure level, the conquest is deepening. Reliance on the cloud forms the skeleton of the new colonial order. Countries install data centers to reduce latency, but ownership remains elsewhere. National agencies rely on platforms governed by foreign terms. AI-powered public services—identity verification, health triage, tax fraud detection—rely on external programming interfaces.

Developers use tools that require adaptation to large US open source repositories. Disputes about content moderation, ethics, or accuracy are sent back to Silicon Valley to be resolved.

The empire never sleeps; it synchronizes and updates. Politicians, programmers, and designers across Africa and Central Asia adapt their workflows to the updates of the corporate model. Each update changes the conditions of reality. Sovereignty becomes a variable. Nations without hardware capacity adapt their institutions to imported logic.

Parallel systems are now emerging. In Kenya, Swahili datasets are growing with local stories, songs, and laws. In India, language models in Sanskrit and Hindi are finding their way into public research labs. In Indonesia, the Quranic ontology is shaping new knowledge graphs for ethical recommendation systems. In Venezuela, community coders are mapping folk medicine in structured datasets.

These are not copies. These are creations of new forms. They stand within their own cosmologies. The datasets are based on poems, rituals, and oral testimonies. The models are based on memory rather than just writing. Universities in Brazil, South Africa, and Iran are developing multilingual transformers with regional epistemologies. These initiatives require time, energy, and loyalty. They grow slowly, with patience and pride. Every line of code bends toward independence.

Generative sovereignty begins with the voice. It expands with a procession. It persists through ceremonies and commands. The lands once mapped as raw material zones are now building new forms of data wealth.
The children born outside Silicon Valley are beginning to shape their own interfaces. They write questionnaires in Amharic. They compose user journeys in Quechua. They name their models after rivers, gods, and ancestors. The algorithm becomes a tool, not an oracle. Data flows inward. Servers host myths.

The machine no longer speaks first. It listens. The interface reflects tradition. The pattern changes. Through these changes, the new world enters into itself. It walks upright. It shapes the syntax to fit the tone. Each prompt unlocks territory. Each training cycle builds mass.

The new world codes with full memory. The constructors remember every mine, every merchant ship, and every fiber cable rolled out under the promise of help.

They name their models in honor of resistance, not assimilation. The foundation speaks in ancestral order. The future grows through unbridled power. Generative power grows across borders—without licensing fees, without dependency, and without cultural extraction. The servers stay on. Language patterns multiply. The world reclaims its grammar.

Retrieved from RT, published July 6, 2025
Translated by PerJ with Deepl Translate
Original article: Western AI doesn't answer questions – it installs values

The text represents the author's opinion, not necessarily that of www.derimot.no.