Himal Giri

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often understood as a tool that can preserve, translate, promote, or hreaten culture. This article argues that AI does not merely circulate cultural content; it becomes he infrastructure through which cultures are made visible, authorized, translated, valued, and enabled-or prevented--from shaping the future. Through training data, model design recommendation systems, content moderation, and platform ownership, AI determines which languages, aesthetics, memories, and knowledge systems attain cultural authority. Cultural homogenization is therefore not simply the spread of similar content; it is the narrowing of the epistemic, linguistic, aesthetic, and institutional conditions through which different civilizations nake meaning and build futures. The article responds to four central questions: Can Al coexist with cultural plurality? Whose values should AI align with? Who controls cultural data anguages, and creative works? And why is cultural preservation alone insufficient? It argues that these questions require more than better representation or ethical guidelines; they require restructuring the data, value systems, ownership, and governance of Al itself. To address this, the article develops a theory of civilizational pluralist AÏ governance. It advances three concepts cultural data sovereignty, affirming community authority over cultural data, consent, provenance ınd benefit-sharing; pluralist value alignment, treating alignment as participatory and context- sensitive rather than the universalization of one moral framework; and polycentric cultura. accountability, requiring shared responsibility among communities, creators, states, platforms, and global institutions. Drawing on the Himalayan and Nepali context as a lived example of inguistic, religious, and cultural plurality, the article shows that small and plural societies car provide a normative imagination for AI governance beyond Western universalism. It concludes that the central question is no longer only "Who may speak?" but "Whose knowledge, language,memory, and creativity become the infrastructure of AI's future?" Civilizational pluralism requires moving beyond preservation toward cultural sovereignty, equitable cultural economies, participatory value alignment, and polycentric AI governance.