Beyond Bias - Making AI More Inclusive

<<Call for Applications>>
 
Are you a curator, independent cultural practitioner or part of a museum, cultural organisation or a community advocate interested in the role of AI in shaping our understanding of global arts and cultures?

Join us for a hands-on workshop that explores how artificial intelligence can both reflect and reshape cultural narratives—especially those beyond the Western canon.

The project works to reduce representational bias in AI systems, with a focus on the arts and cultural practices of non-Western countries. This workshop introduces a simple AI prototype tool to fine-tune AI image and video creation models on under-represented datasets. Together during the workshop, we will test and critically engage with the tool, assessing and providing feedback on its potential, its limitations, and its implications for curatorial, artistic and cultural work.

This project seeks to identify and spread best practices in building inclusive AI tools with key stakeholders from the cultural sectors as partners in the tool-creation process.

<<What to expect>>

• Participate in the workshop to use and give feedback on a prototype AI tool that enables people to create fine-tuned AI models with their own image datasets
• Discuss how AI intersects with curatorial practices, cultural equity, and representation
• Collaborate with peers across the cultural and technology sectors to actively build more inclusive AI futures
• Incredible imagery generated from under-represented datasets

<<Who should attend?>>

Cultural practitioners, curators, researchers, and others working at the intersection of technology, culture, social justice and archives—especially those interested in decolonial approaches to digital tools. Let’s challenge the biases of AI together and explore how cultural perspectives can inform more ethical, inclusive technologies.

Application deadline is 30.09.2025. the selection of the participants will be communicated on 01.10.2025.

<<About the Project>>

The initiative Beyond Bias – making AI more inclusive is a collaborative effort by the Goethe-Institut in India and Gooey.AI, dedicated to reimagining the way generative AI is built. We follow a proactive, participatory process of actively identifying and addressing embedded biases. Together, we seek to demonstrate how inclusive, value-driven AI tools and models can be created through a collective and transparent process.

The initiative led to the drafting of a living manifesto, rooted in principles of equity, transparency, and ethical AI development. Participants collaboratively shaped actionable guidelines, which now serve as the cornerstone for both the manifesto and an early wireframe prototype of an inclusive AI tool. In a series of in-person workshops in October 2025, participants in Bangalore, Delhi and Pune will work with the prototype to fine-tune models that reflect their own aesthetic languages—whether rooted in personal practice or community identity. These workshops will also serve as a space to define essential features of the tool, propose meaningful safeguards, and further enrich the open manifesto.

In a series of in-person workshops in October 2025, participants in Bangalore, Delhi and Pune will work with the prototype to fine-tune models that reflect their own aesthetic languages—whether rooted in personal practice or community identity. These workshops will also serve as a space to define essential features of the tool, propose meaningful safeguards, and further enrich the open manifesto.

We are thrilled to invite you to be part of this process as a participant or co-host. Join us in co-creating a tool and co-authoring a live manifesto, in a build-in-public and participatory process that aims to begin proactively shaping the future of AI—ethically, inclusively, and together.