Culture

Opening — Why this matters now AI assistants are no longer quiet utilities humming in the background. They talk back. They empathize. They ask follow-up questions. In short, they behave suspiciously like social actors. This design direction has triggered a familiar anxiety in AI governance: human-like AI leads to misplaced trust. Regulators worry. Ethicists warn. Designers hedge. Yet most of these arguments rest on theory, small samples, or Western-centric assumptions. ...

What if every story, no matter where it’s set, ends with a cheerful festival and a return to tradition? That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what happens when you ask OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini to generate 11,800 stories, one for nearly every nationality on Earth. Researchers Jill Walker Rettberg and Hermann Wigers did just that — and uncovered a startling truth: generative AI doesn’t just reproduce representational bias (like stereotyping a “doctor” as a white man), it also imposes narrative bias — structural sameness beneath a veneer of cultural difference. ...