A recent debate on AI’s impact on the cultural sector highlighted a stark contrast between the West’s fear of AI and the optimism of AI enthusiasts in the Global South. The debate, which included Dutch politicians and creative-industry leaders, featured a lone optimist arguing that fear and risk should not be the primary lens for governing artificial intelligence.
The Global South is home to some of AI’s most enthusiastic and inventive users, with countries like China, Indonesia, and Thailand showing a markedly different attitude towards AI. According to Stanford’s 2025 AI Index, 83% of respondents in China, 80% in Indonesia, and 77% in Thailand said AI-powered products offer more benefits than drawbacks.
AI Adoption in the West
In the West, fear of AI has helped turn pessimism into a cultural virtue. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that only 17% of U.S. adults think AI will have a positive impact on the country over the next 20 years. This fear has led to a culture of protectionism, with many in the West hunkering down and romanticizing legacy systems rather than exploring new possibilities.
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In contrast, creative industries in the majority world have spent decades dealing with piracy and weak enforcement, forcing them to think beyond rights-based policing and focus on how creators can receive value. For example, Anghami, the biggest music app in the Middle East, pays musicians from their first stream, rather than only after a song reaches a minimum threshold.
Demographics play a significant role in the differing attitudes towards AI. Nearly 90% of the world’s young people live outside the West, and they are not simply using AI, they are playing with it. In cities like Hyderabad and Bengaluru, billboards for AI crash courses and Bollywood films promoted as AI-made are common sights.
A founder in Gurgaon noted that AI has allowed her to reach clients far beyond the English-speaking world, reinventing her business in a fraction of the time it once took. A civic activist in Chennai taught herself to code with AI and built a gender violence-alert app in multiple languages, at a moment when funding for such work is drying up and state scrutiny is rising.
Building for Need, Not Market Share
In the West, corporations often pressure employees and customers to use AI to maximize market return. In contrast, many countries in the Global South are building technologies around concrete public needs, frequently with scarce capital and resources. India’s India Stack, a public digital infrastructure for identity, payments, and data-sharing, is an example of this approach.
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India, with a fraction of Europe’s resources, has developed a system that companies can build on, rather than infrastructure controlled by a handful of private platforms. Europe is now looking to India’s example as it develops EuroStack, in response to the growing need for digital sovereignty. They should pay closer attention to these developments, as they may hold the key to a more inclusive and equitable approach to AI adoption.
Young people around the world are using AI for work, entertainment, romance, creativity, activism, and self-expression, often without waiting for institutions to tell them what the technology is supposed to be for. In China, AI-made micro-dramas have become a multibillion-dollar industry, with films like Zombie Cleaner, made for less than $500, attracting tens of millions of views overseas.
This highlights the potential for AI to be used as a tool for social change and activism.