From human-centered to posthumanist AI-driven cross-cultural education: Practical and ethical dilemmas

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed cross-cultural education from a human-centered paradigm into a posthumanist ecology, distributing cognitive agency across networks of human and non-human actors. While theoretically promising, this shift is fraught with practical and ethical dilemmas that threaten the goals of cross-cultural education. Employing critical discourse analysis, this paper provides a novel analysis that first examines the epistemic shortcomings of human-centered cross-cultural education—including curricular bias and ineffective pedagogy, research limitations, and Eurocentric biases and misrepresentations. It then demonstrates how these shortcomings are systematically automated, amplified, and reinforced by posthumanist AI systems with opaque algorithms trained on biased datasets. The resulting practical problems—automation of biased data, undefined non-human agency, exclusion of human values, and culturally misaligned generated content—undermine AI ethical principles of fairness, accountability, transparency, and reliability. The synthesized analysis concludes that ignoring these considerations privileges dominant Western epistemology, with its inherent biases, and further marginalizes alternative knowledge systems, thereby turning AI-driven cross-cultural education into an engine of Eurocentric digital colonialism. To counter this, the article proposes a new model that addresses the identified problems and integrates essential human values—such as empathy, cooperation, and communication—for culturally competent AI-driven education.