philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Why the world is looking to ditch US AI models

... the Trump administration's shocking, rapid gutting of the US government (and its push into what some prominent political scientists call  “competitive authoritarianism”) also affects the operations and policies of American tech companies—many of which, of course, have users far beyond US borders. People at RightsCon said they were already seeing changes in these companies’ willingness to engage with and invest in communities that have smaller user bases—especially non-English-speaking ones. 

As a result, some policymakers and business leaders—in Europe, in particular—are reconsidering their reliance on US-based tech and asking whether they can quickly spin up better, homegrown alternatives. This is particularly true for AI. ...

Social media content moderation systems—which already use automation and are also experimenting with deploying large language models to flag problematic posts—are failing to detect gender-based violence in places as varied as India, South Africa, and Brazil. If platforms begin to rely even more on LLMs for content moderation, this problem will likely get worse, says Marlena Wisniak, a human rights lawyer who focuses on AI governance at the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law. “The LLMs are moderated poorly, and the poorly moderated LLMs are then also used to moderate other content,” she tells me. “It’s so circular, and the errors just keep repeating and amplifying.” ...

Part of the problem is that the systems are trained primarily on data from the English-speaking world (and American English at that), and as a result, they perform less well with local languages and context. ...

... “smaller language models might be worthy competitors of multilingual language models in specific, low-resource languages,” says Aliya Bhatia, a visiting fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology who researches automated content moderation. ...

“Fundamentally, the training data a model trains on is akin to the worldview it develops.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/25/1113696/why-the-world-is-looking-to-ditch-us-ai-models/