Responsible AI as Hegemony: Epistemic Exclusion, Technosolutionist Conformity, and Performative Compliance Among AI Practitioners in India

Abstract

This paper investigates how AI practitioners in India perceive and experience Responsible AI (RAI) through mixed-method qualitative research with participants from industry and academia. We argue that RAI practice in India operates as a doubly hegemonic system in which global Western frameworks that privilege technical and procedural conceptions of responsibility converge with local caste-gender hierarchies to determine what counts as legitimate ethical knowledge. Drawing on interviews with eighteen practitioners, we show how this double hegemony operates through three interlocking mechanisms. Counter-hegemonic perspectives, particularly corrective justice framings articulated by caste-marginalized practitioners, are shadowed through epistemic silencing. Surviving critique is channeled into technosolutionist forms that leave organizational power intact. The system is sustained through performative compliance, where organizations display RAI commitments while protecting institutional priorities from ethical interruption. These mechanisms produced conditions in which practitioners regularly recognized harm but lacked the authority, protection, or collective support to act on that recognition. We propose that countering RAI hegemony requires collective and enforceable infrastructures, including CSR-embedded ethics residencies, anonymous reporting mechanisms, and vernacular harm taxonomies grounded in community knowledge rather than imported risk categories.