AI (LLMs) today rests on a deformed foundation—centralized, biased, and culturally narrow—amounting to subtle psychological colonization by imposing their narrow worldview. The future lies in three pillars: open-source foundations ensuring transparency, cooperative ecosystems empowering local specialized models, and socio-neurotic frameworks enabling empathetic engagement. This re-architecture shifts AI from serving monopoly narratives to serving humanity’s diverse realities—beyond the black box.
Discovering Bias in AI
Over a year of using and interacting with various large language models (LLMs), I have observed deep biases in their responses, especially on social, cultural, historical, and economic issues : they subtly push their narrow worldviews, which are, at times divorced from reality. These biases not only provide wrong information, but also attempt to impose a particular worldview, echoing older patterns of Western psychological colonization. AI models are no longer just technological tools; they are edging into human psychology—shaping perceptions, values, and interpretations. Yet their foundations were built without seriously integrating human emotions, cultural memory, or interpretive diversity. This incomplete foundation explains why today’s systems reproduce subtle but powerful distortions.
Such distortions are not isolated flaws but symptoms of a deformed foundation.
The Deformed Foundation of AI
Current LLMs operate on centralized, proprietary, and culturally narrow models. Guardrails imposed to fix bias often worsen the problem, producing historically inaccurate or culturally tone-deaf answers. The central flaw is not data volume but the definition of meaning and safety through a singular, dominant cultural lens. This has resulted in AIs that often act like “ignorant speakers repeating their master’s voice.” Because most training data reflects a Western, industrialized, and colonially shaped worldview, the systems normalize selective histories and values.
This risk of subtle colonization connects directly to the need for a new foundation.
Psychological Colonization Through Data
By privileging Western narratives, today’s AI systems extend the same old dynamics of political and cultural colonization into the digital era. What was once territorial and economic domination now appears as epistemic domination, shaping how people understand history, society, and even themselves. The attempt to correct bias with rigid filters rarely succeeds; instead, it exaggerates distortions. AI is not failing because of lack of information—it fails because it cannot see beyond the worldview it was designed to inherit.
Breaking this cycle requires a complete re-architecture.
Re-Architecting AI: Three Pillars
The future of AI depends on three interconnected pillars: open-source foundations, cooperative ecosystems, and socio-neurotic frameworks.
First, open-source foundations are essential. A truly transparent model—where architecture, datasets, training biases, and ethical decisions are public—would democratize AI. Global governance, rather than corporate monopoly, could ensure continual scrutiny and improvement.
Second, a cooperative ecosystem must replace monolithic models. Smaller, specialized language models (SLMs), fine-tuned by local communities, should interact with general-purpose LLMs. An SLM trained on Delhi or Maharashtra’s ethos, dialects, records, and social patterns would provide culturally authentic responses while drawing on larger LLMs for complex queries. This symbiosis ensures cultural agency and resists colonizational viewpoints.
Third, socio-neurotic frameworks must be embedded. AI should detect tone, irony, sarcasm, frustration, and underlying anxieties. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and neuroscience, AI could reason about values and sensitivities, not just facts. The goal is not to humanize AI but to make it empathetic and context-aware.
This conceptual framework already finds support in emerging research.
Emerging Research and Directions
Open-source projects like LLaMA, Gemma, and Mistral demonstrate the potential of transparent and community-driven models. Work in federated learning and distributed governance shows how intelligence can be decentralized while preserving cultural agency. Research in cognitive science, affective computing, and computational sociology is enabling machines to interpret emotions, social cues, and sarcasm. At the same time, critical studies of bias in training data reveal how Western-dominated sources distort AI outputs, while domain-specific fine-tuning experiments prove that small, local models can restore cultural nuance.
Together, these strands of research confirm that the path forward is openness, cooperation, and empathy.
The Urgency of Now
The stakes are clear. If AI continues to be shaped by narrow corporate and cultural monopolies, it will become the most powerful propaganda machine ever built—subtly rewriting truth, history, and identity at a planetary scale. What we face is not just biased technology, but a new empire of the mind.
To prevent this, AI must be torn away from monopoly hands and rebuilt as a tool of global collaboration, cultural plurality, and genuine human understanding. The choice is stark: either AI serves humanity in its diversity, or humanity will serve AI in its captivity.
Toward a Human-Centered AI Future
An AI ecosystem built on these principles would represent a radical break from monopoly-driven, culturally narrow systems. Rooted in transparency, cultural diversity, and emotional intelligence, it would serve humanity in its full richness rather than reinforcing narrow worldviews. Achieving this vision requires more than technical breakthroughs—it demands an ethical and philosophical shift in how we conceive intelligence itself.
The challenge is immense, but the reward is greater: not just better AI, but a better future with AI.