Institutions
Beyond Europe: AI in International Relations and Communication
December 2024 · Poznań
As artificial intelligence reshapes diplomacy and communication, the decisive questions are not only technical but cultural — and they are still largely unexplored.
Artificial intelligence now touches international relations and communication as profoundly as any technology of the past century. Yet while enormous research effort goes into the inner mechanics of these systems, the deeper interaction between AI and the social and cultural systems it operates within remains comparatively unexamined — and therefore less understood and less anticipated.
Performance is culturally situated
A model trained in one cultural context does not necessarily perform well in another. Differences in language, social norms and regulatory environment mean that a system built and tuned in one region may behave sub-optimally elsewhere, with consequences that run from the individual to the political level. The cultural identity of the user shapes how AI is understood and used in decision-making — a reminder that performance cannot be assessed in the abstract, divorced from the people and societies a system serves.
The deeper layer: data and its labelling
Beneath performance lies a more fundamental determinant: how a system is trained and fed. The quality of data — and of data labelling — matters more than sheer quantity. Much labelling today is performed by a low-cost, often opaque workforce, raising both ethical questions about labour conditions and practical questions about quality. Where labelling is weak, errors and unexamined cultural assumptions enter the system without being detected, for lack of genuine semantic analysis.
Even unsupervised learning offers no guarantee of neutrality, since the machines doing the training were themselves trained on supervised data. And because the self-organisation of a neural network's hidden layers remains opaque, a practical, widely applicable "explainable AI" has yet to emerge. We are, in effect, building powerful systems whose embedded values — ours, including our blind spots — interact in ways we cannot fully explain.
The response is not to slow research or restrict the market, but to widen genuine cross-cultural cooperation and to bring these questions to international decision tables. No knowledge is ever neutral; the more powerful it is, the more carefully its foundations must be examined.