Power and Play: Investigating "License to Critique" in Teams' AI Ethics Discussions

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Widder, David Gray, Dabbish, Laura, Herbsleb, James, Martelaro, Nikolas
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Widder, David Gray
Dabbish, Laura
Herbsleb, James
Martelaro, Nikolas
author_facet Widder, David Gray
Dabbish, Laura
Herbsleb, James
Martelaro, Nikolas
contents Past work has sought to design AI ethics interventions--such as checklists or toolkits--to help practitioners design more ethical AI systems. However, other work demonstrates how these interventions may instead serve to limit critique to that addressed within the intervention, while rendering broader concerns illegitimate. In this paper, drawing on work examining how standards enact discursive closure and how power relations affect whether and how people raise critique, we recruit three corporate teams, and one activist team, each with prior context working with one another, to play a game designed to trigger broad discussion around AI ethics. We use this as a point of contrast to trigger reflection on their teams' past discussions, examining factors which may affect their "license to critique" in AI ethics discussions. We then report on how particular affordances of this game may influence discussion, and find that the hypothetical context created in the game is unlikely to be a viable mechanism for real world change. We discuss how power dynamics within a group and notions of "scope" affect whether people may be willing to raise critique in AI ethics discussions, and discuss our finding that games are unlikely to enable direct changes to products or practice, but may be more likely to allow members to find critically-aligned allies for future collective action.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_19049
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Power and Play: Investigating "License to Critique" in Teams' AI Ethics Discussions
Widder, David Gray
Dabbish, Laura
Herbsleb, James
Martelaro, Nikolas
Computers and Society
Past work has sought to design AI ethics interventions--such as checklists or toolkits--to help practitioners design more ethical AI systems. However, other work demonstrates how these interventions may instead serve to limit critique to that addressed within the intervention, while rendering broader concerns illegitimate. In this paper, drawing on work examining how standards enact discursive closure and how power relations affect whether and how people raise critique, we recruit three corporate teams, and one activist team, each with prior context working with one another, to play a game designed to trigger broad discussion around AI ethics. We use this as a point of contrast to trigger reflection on their teams' past discussions, examining factors which may affect their "license to critique" in AI ethics discussions. We then report on how particular affordances of this game may influence discussion, and find that the hypothetical context created in the game is unlikely to be a viable mechanism for real world change. We discuss how power dynamics within a group and notions of "scope" affect whether people may be willing to raise critique in AI ethics discussions, and discuss our finding that games are unlikely to enable direct changes to products or practice, but may be more likely to allow members to find critically-aligned allies for future collective action.
title Power and Play: Investigating "License to Critique" in Teams' AI Ethics Discussions
topic Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19049