TRAIF 2026 Panel: Responsible AI & Human Experience: a Multi-Cultural Take

As part of The Responsible AI Forum (TRAIF) at Amerikahaus 2026 in Munich, the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (IEAI) hosted a panel on Responsible AI and Human Experience: a Multi-Cultural Take. Held on May 20th, 2026, the conversation brought together Dr. Johannes Karl (cultural-evolutionary psychologist, University of Zurich), Ms. Öznur Uğuz, (PhD candidate, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies and visiting researcher, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law) and Brigadier General, US Army (Retired) David Barnes (Founder & CEO EMPOWERING AI; visiting professor, IEAI, TUM; and senior fellow, Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government). The panel was moderated by Dr. Auxane Boch (IEAI, TUM).

The panel examined how deeply AI systems, and the conversations we have about aligning them with human values, are shaped by a narrow, largely Western evidence base, and what gets lost when emotion, privacy and even the idea of a “normal” human experience are treated as culturally universal rather than culturally constructed. Panelists traced this thread through concrete examples, including bias in facial-expression recognition, the difficulty of teaching AI to infer emotion across cultures and cross-cultural clinical cases where a “symptom” in one culture is an ordinary experience in another. The discussion turned to AI companionship and care, weighing its promise for easing loneliness in old age against the risk that younger users raised on responsive, low-friction AI relationships might never learn to navigate the unpredictability of real human ones, and against the difficulty of even defining safeguards for systems that infer emotion from text as much as from biometric data.

The panel closed by weighing whether culturally representative AI is realistically achievable given how concentrated AI development remains in a few countries and whether regulation such as the EU AI Act goes far enough in requiring training data to reflect the diversity of the people it is meant to serve, leaving the audience with more open questions than settled answers about who should be responsible for closing that gap.

The Responsible AI Forum 2026 was funded by the European Union. More on alignAI.

Watch a video of the panel below.