The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South CHAPTER 9 The Missing Blocks of AI: A Feminist Reimagination, The Story That Didn’t Fit By Shohini Banerjee and Vaishali Soni In Lucknow, a young girl wanted to tell a story using Canva. As she explored the visuals available to her, she realized there were no images of kitchens that resembled her own. There were modern countertops, chimneys, and stainless steel fixtures, but not the wooden cupboards, stone slabs, or local utensils she saw every day. Her experiences did not fit into the ‘templates’ Canva offered; templates largely designed by, and through a Western, linear, and global-North lens. Canva is just one example, but the issue runs much deeper. Artificial intelligence (AI) comes with the promise that it can generate anything we ask, transcending borders and boundaries and representing an array of realities and imaginations. But there’s a catch: it knows only what it has been fed. And what it has been fed is not the full range of human life, but a narrow, dominant slice of it. This is how bias becomes embedded. This is how many stories, languages, and experiences get left out. At its core, AI is a system that compresses human life into data, sorts it, and then uses that data to make decisions through algorithmic logic. The process starts with massive datasets scraped from our digital traces, which are then labeled by humans, often low-paid “invisible workers”1, who are given the parameters of labeling so that the machine learning model can “learn” to create the desired output. But this technology, supposedly objective, neutral, and efficient, often excludes those who do not fit the dominant narrative, both online, in who gets represented, and offline, through who is creating. As Chun (2024) notes, AI consolidates stereotypes and homogenised discourses about what is, in reality, a hugely diverse and heterogeneous social world. This creates systems that not only misunderstand, but actively harm those who live outside dominant norms. The Missing Blocks of AI delves 122 The Missing Blocks of AI The Missing Blocks of AI AI consolidates stereotypes and homogenised discourses about what is, in reality, a hugely diverse and heterogeneous social world. 123