Aeon: “…For many people, GenAI is becoming their primary way to learn about the world. A large-scale study published in September 2025, analysing how people have been using ChatGPT since its launch in November 2022, revealed that around half the queries were for practical guidance, or to seek information. These systems may appear neutral, but they are far from it. The most popular models privilege dominant epistemologies (typically Western and institutional) while marginalising alternative ways of knowing, especially those encoded in oral traditions, embodied practice and the languages considered ‘low-resource’ in the computing world, such as Hindi or Swahili, both spoken by hundreds of millions. By amplifying these hierarchies, GenAI risks contributing to the erasure of systems of understanding that have evolved over centuries, disconnecting future generations from vast bodies of insights and wisdom that were never encoded yet remain essential to human ways of knowing. What’s at stake then isn’t just representation – it’s the resilience and diversity of knowledge itself…

When AI systems lack adequate exposure to a language, they have blind spots in their comprehension of human experience. For example, data from Common Crawl, one of the largest public sources of training data, reveals stark inequalities. It contains more than 300 billion web pages spanning 18 years, but English dominates with 44 per cent of the content. What’s even more concerning is the imbalance between how many people speak a language in the physical world and how much that language is represented in online data. Take Hindi, for example, the third most spoken language globally, spoken by around 7.5 per cent of the world’s population. It accounts for only 0.2 per cent of Common Crawl’s data. The situation is even more dire for Tamil, my own mother tongue. Despite being spoken by more than 86 million people worldwide, it represents just 0.04 per cent of the data. In contrast, English is spoken by approximately 20 per cent of the global population (including both native and non-native speakers), but it dominates the digital space by an exponentially larger margin. Similarly, other colonial languages such as French, Italian and Portuguese, with far fewer speakers than Hindi, are also better represented online…”