Toward Understanding AI Adoption in the Global South: An Empirical Study of Creative Practitioners' Experiences in Iran
This empirical study examines the experiences of creative practitioners in Iran with Generative AI, revealing how geopolitical constraints and technical limitations shape their adoption through dominant director mental models, compensatory labor, and the emergence of bottom-up "Folk Ethics" to navigate systemic inequities.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Imagine the world of art and design as a massive, bustling kitchen. For decades, chefs (creative professionals) have used tools like blenders and ovens (traditional software) to make their dishes. These tools were predictable: if you pressed a button, the blender spun. But recently, a new kind of magical sous-chef has arrived. This isn't just a blender; it's an AI that can taste your ingredients, guess what you want, and sometimes even cook up a whole new recipe on its own. This is Generative AI. It's exciting, but it's also a bit unpredictable. Sometimes it makes a masterpiece; other times, it serves up something weird or completely wrong.
Now, most of the stories about this magical sous-chef come from chefs in big, wealthy cities where the kitchen is fully stocked, the electricity never flickers, and the ingredients are fresh. But what about chefs in other parts of the world? What happens when the kitchen has a broken door, the ingredients are scarce, or the magical sous-chef only knows how to cook food from a different country? This is where our story takes place. The researchers wanted to see how creative people in Iran, a place often left out of these high-tech conversations, are learning to cook with this new AI. They wanted to know: Is the AI a helpful partner, or just a confusing tool? And what happens when the tool doesn't quite understand the local culture?
The Magic Box and the Iranian Chefs
In a recent study, two researchers, Farzaneh Hosseinian and Iman Sheikhansari, decided to peek into the kitchens of 16 creative professionals in Iran. These weren't just random people; they were architects, graphic designers, fashion creators, and marketers who had already started using AI in their work. Before the deep dive, the researchers also sent out a survey to 129 people to get a broad sense of the landscape.
Think of the AI they were using as a "Magic Box." You put a request in, and it spits out an image, a story, or a design. But the Iranian chefs found that using this Magic Box wasn't as simple as just pressing a button. They discovered that to get the Magic Box to work right, they had to become something like Directors or Senior Designers.
Imagine you are directing a movie. You don't act out every single scene yourself, and you certainly don't build the sets or sew the costumes. But you are the one holding the vision. You tell the actors what to do, you check the lighting, and you make sure the story makes sense. That's exactly how these Iranian creatives saw themselves. Even though the AI was doing the heavy lifting of generating images or text, the humans felt they had to stay in the driver's seat. They weren't just pressing buttons; they were orchestrating the whole show. One participant even compared it to a movie: the AI might generate the picture, but the human is the director who owns the final film.
The "Adoption Tax": Paying to Play
Here is where the story gets a little bumpy. The researchers found that for these Iranian creatives, using AI comes with a hidden cost they call the "Adoption Tax."
Imagine you want to buy a ticket to a concert. In some countries, you just swipe your card and walk in. But for our Iranian chefs, the ticket booth is locked. They can't use their regular credit cards because of international rules (sanctions). They have to find a secret back door, pay extra fees, and jump through hoops just to get into the building. That's the first part of the tax: the Access Levy. It's the extra time, money, and stress required just to get the tool in the first place.
Once they are inside, the second part of the tax kicks in: the Correction Levy. The Magic Box was trained mostly on data from Western countries. So, when an Iranian architect asks for a picture of a traditional Persian building, the AI might give them a generic "Middle Eastern" building that looks nothing like the real thing. It's like asking for a specific type of tea and getting a cup of coffee instead. To fix this, the chefs have to manually edit the AI's output, painting over the mistakes and adding the right details themselves. They aren't just creating art; they are acting as mechanics, fixing the AI's cultural misunderstandings before they can even start their real work. This extra, unpaid labor is the "tax" they pay for using a tool that wasn't built for them.
The "Folk Ethics": Making Up the Rules
Because there are no official rulebooks for how to use AI in Iran (and honestly, not many in the rest of the world either), these creatives had to make up their own rules. The researchers call this "Folk Ethics."
Think of it like a group of kids playing a new game in the park where no one has the instruction manual. They have to decide together: "Is it cheating if we use this power-up?" "Who wins if we both use the same move?"
The Iranian creatives developed their own moral code. They decided that if you just take what the AI makes and say "I made this," that's dishonest. But if you take the AI's idea, tweak it, add your own human touch, and fix its mistakes, then you can claim it as your own. They also realized they have a duty to check the AI's work. If the AI makes up facts or lies, it's the human's job to catch it. They are the "human filters" making sure the final product is real and responsible.
What They Found (and What They Didn't)
The study suggests that while AI can speed up work and help generate ideas, it hasn't replaced the human creator. Instead, the human has shifted from being the "maker" to being the "manager." The AI is a powerful assistant, but it needs a strong leader to guide it, especially when the AI gets confused by local culture or technical limits.
The researchers also found that the way these people use AI is very different from what we might see in the US or Europe. In the West, the focus might be on "how cool is this new feature?" In Iran, the focus is often on "how do I get this to work at all, and how do I fix it when it gets my culture wrong?"
The paper doesn't claim that AI is bad or that it will ruin art. Instead, it suggests that for AI to be truly helpful for everyone, it needs to be more flexible. It needs to understand different cultures better and be easier to access without needing a secret back door. Until then, creative people in places like Iran will keep being the brave directors, the patient mechanics, and the ethical guardians, figuring out how to make this new technology work for them, one manual fix at a time.
In short, the Magic Box is powerful, but it needs a human hand to steer it, especially when the road gets rocky. And for the chefs in Iran, that road is full of extra hurdles they have to jump over just to get started.
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