Decolonial AI Alignment: Openness, Vi\'{s}e\d{s}a-Dharma, and Including Excluded Knowledges

Understand

Prior work has explicated the coloniality of artificial intelligence (AI) development and deployment through mechanisms such as extractivism, automation, sociological essentialism, surveillance, and containment.

• However, that work has not engaged much with alignment: teaching behaviors to a large language model (LLM) in line with desired values, and has not considered a mechanism that arises within that process: moral absolutism -- a part of the coloniality of knowledge.
• Colonialism has a history of altering the beliefs and values of colonized peoples; in this paper, I argue that this history is recapitulated in current LLM alignment practices and technologies.
• Furthermore, I suggest that AI alignment be decolonialized using three forms of openness: openness of models, openness to society, and openness to excluded knowledges.