What Topics Does the NeurIPS 2022 Cultures in AI/AI in Culture Workshop Cover?

The workshop centers on a two-way relationship: how culture shapes AI development, and how AI systems in turn shape culture. According to the workshop's own description, it is a cross-disciplinary event held virtually as part of NeurIPS 2022 on December 9, bringing together AI/ML researchers and experts in HCI and the social sciences. Its topics are best understood as four connected threads, described below.

How Culture Enters AI Systems

The workshop treats AI development as something shaped by the particular perspectives of the people and institutions behind it. The description identifies several concrete channels through which human values and biases become embedded:

• Annotation practices — the judgments of the people labeling data
• Training data pipelines — what data is collected and how it is processed
• Model design choices — decisions made during system construction
• Larger organizational incentives — the pressures and priorities of the institutions building AI

The stated concern is that foundational AI/ML research "lacks a deeper understanding of what culture is and the ways in which it relates to AI research and development." Without that understanding, the workshop argues, researchers cannot fully diagnose the biases being "unconsciously globalized" through AI development.

How AI Shapes Cultural Production and Consumption

The reverse direction receives equal attention. The workshop points to AI-driven tools for art, music, and language production that curate content and shape consumption patterns. AI-generated art is named specifically as an area of enormous cultural impact now that AI researchers are directly involved in designing such systems. This makes the question of AI's influence on global cultures a live research topic rather than a distant concern.

The Two Named Panels

The workshop's agenda is organized around two panels, which indicate where the discussion is concentrated:

The page lists these panel titles but does not enumerate individual speakers or talks in the available material, so specific presentations should be checked against the workshop site directly.

Why the Workshop Frames Culture Broadly

The description defines culture as "a set of worldviews, beliefs and social practices" — a deliberately broad framing. The stated goal is to complexify the field's understanding of culture, on the reasoning that producing "culturally sensitive, responsive, and competent AI systems" requires thinking about both the cultures shaping AI production and the effects those systems have on global cultures. The workshop positions itself as bridging the NeurIPS/ML community with outside expertise, noting that researchers from beyond machine learning "bring key perspectives and method[s]" that the ML community alone does not supply.

Practical Details for Assessing Relevance

• Format: virtual, held as part of NeurIPS 2022 on December 9
• Audience: cross-disciplinary — AI/ML researchers plus HCI and social science scholars
• Structure signals: the page also lists "Reviewing" and "Presentation Format" as sections, indicating a peer-reviewed submission process with defined presentation formats

If your interest is in bias and values in ML pipelines, content recommendation and generation, or the social-science side of AI, the workshop's scope overlaps directly. If you need the specific accepted papers, speaker lineup, or submission deadlines, those are not contained in the page excerpt above and should be confirmed on the workshop site itself.