KATI (Ktown Artificial Team Intelligence) is Ktown Team's community AI. It is built for Koreatown, Los Angeles — a neighborhood shaped by immigration, multiple languages, and working families navigating systems that were not designed with them in mind.

KATI exists to help people find what they need — a health clinic, tenant rights information, a school program, a city service — in the language they think in, without requiring technical knowledge, and without collecting more than is necessary to help.

It is not a product. It is infrastructure — the same way roads and water are infrastructure. Its purpose is to work reliably, stay out of the way, and be there when someone needs it.

PAI Framework

KATI is built under the People Artificial Intelligence (PAI) framework. The core principle: AI should be built with communities, not just for them.

In practice this means:

  • The community defines what problems are worth solving before development begins
  • Outcomes are measured by whether people's lives improve, not by engagement metrics
  • The community can change direction, slow down, or stop development if it conflicts with their values
  • Human oversight is maintained for any decision that significantly affects individuals

Who It Is For

KATI is designed for the people most likely to be left out of conventional technology: those unfamiliar with AI tools, those with good reasons to distrust institutions, those for whom a wrong answer has real consequences.

Many people carry fear or skepticism toward AI — not because they misunderstand it, but because they have lived experience with systems that claimed to help and instead extracted, surveilled, or ignored them. That skepticism is reasonable. KATI is designed to earn trust slowly, through consistency and usefulness, not through claims.

For those who never want to interact with AI directly, there is always a person. The human layer is a first-class option at every step, not a fallback.

Language

Koreatown speaks Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, English, and more — often mixed in the same conversation. Multilingual access is not a feature added to an English-first tool. It is the foundation.

KATI responds in the language a person writes in. It draws on translation trained on local community content — the actual language patterns of Koreatown, not textbook standardizations. The Translate platform's community-reviewed translation infrastructure supports this.

Data and Privacy

KATI collects only what it needs to help. No account is required for basic features. Sensitive interactions are not retained. Users have the right to access, correct, or delete anything KATI holds about them.

Data is hosted locally within Ktown infrastructure. It does not leave the community without the community's knowledge. It is not sold or shared with partners as a condition of funding.

Anonymous interaction is available — particularly important for undocumented residents and others with heightened privacy needs. Privacy is a structural commitment, enforced through technical and legal constraints, not just stated in a policy document.

Economics

When public or community funds are invested in a tool meant to serve Koreatown, those resources should flow back into Koreatown. KATI is built to keep its economic activity local:

  • Infrastructure managed by Ktown Cloud
  • Translators compensated in currency redeemable at local businesses
  • Staffing sourced from the community first
  • Open-source foundation so the investment stays in the commons

KATI is free to use. The residents who need it most will never encounter a paywall. Funding comes from grants, the Ktown Fund, and community partnerships — not from user fees or data monetization.

Current State

KATI is in active development. The current public presence is at ai.ktown.team. The meeting orchestration backend — a multi-model AI committee system for structured community deliberation — is under development. API integration, the multilingual interface, and the resource navigation layer are planned next phases.

Development is led by Ktown Team co-founders Sero and Kai, in collaboration with the Digital Innovation & Technology Inclusion team.

Get Involved

KATI is a community tool — the community builds it. Contributions include:

  • Translating community content through the Translate platform
  • Testing and reporting what does not work
  • Sharing needs that KATI does not yet address
  • Joining the Digital Innovation team to work on it directly

Skills in language, technology, health, law, or education all have a place here.