Enriching Moral Perspectives on AI: Concepts of Trust amongst Africans

TL;DR

This study explores how Africans perceive and conceptualize trust in AI, emphasizing cultural values and social relations, and highlights the need for more context-specific research in African settings.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into African perspectives on AI trust, highlighting cultural influences and expanding understanding beyond Western-centric studies.

Findings

Trust in AI is influenced by cultural and community values.

African respondents emphasize communal relations over individual autonomy.

Factors like education and mobility shape trust concerns and principles.

Abstract

The trustworthiness of AI is considered essential to the adoption and application of AI systems. However, the meaning of trust varies across industry, research and policy spaces. Studies suggest that professionals who develop and use AI regard an AI system as trustworthy based on their personal experiences and social relations at work. Studies about trust in AI and the constructs that aim to operationalise trust in AI (e.g., consistency, reliability, explainability and accountability). However, the majority of existing studies about trust in AI are situated in Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. The few studies about trust and AI in Africa do not include the views of people who develop, study or use AI in their work. In this study, we surveyed 157 people with professional and/or educational interests in AI from 25 African countries, to explore how they conceptualised trust in AI. Most respondents had links with workshops about trust and AI in Africa in Namibia and Ghana. Respondents' educational background, transnational mobility, and country of origin influenced their concerns about AI systems. These factors also affected their levels of distrust in certain AI applications and their emphasis on specific principles designed to foster trust. Respondents often expressed that their values are guided by the communities in which they grew up and emphasised communal relations over individual freedoms. They described trust in many ways, including applying nuances of Afro-relationalism to constructs in international discourse, such as reliability and reliance. Thus, our exploratory study motivates more empirical research about the ways trust is practically enacted and experienced in African social realities of AI design, use and governance.