Democracy In AI/With AI: Critical Storytelling

On March 15, we at AI DeMoS Lab held our first workshop called Moments of Reading: {AI, Design, Democracy}. For this workshop, we wanted to think about how the key three concepts for our lab – AI, design, and democracy – can co-exist with one another since relations between them engender certain ways of thinking and foreclose others.

There is no surprise in the algorithm providing an erroneous output. In certain cases, such errors lead to harm, such as when facial recognition algorithms misrecognize the person, which leads to their detainment. When such mistakes occur, there is an often-occurring impulse to somehow ‘fix’ the algorithm, to minimize the probability of error in various ways by resorting to technical and social interventions. While the potential of an algorithmic error seems inescapable, it is surprising that rarely do such mistakes take as beyond thinking of the algorithm itself as a decision-making device.

As concerns about the impact of AI on contemporary polities proliferate, so do ways to address the democratic deficit of these technologies. Increasingly, the issues of bias, accountability, transparency, and discrimination come to the forefront of public discussions on AI, highlighting the fundamentally political nature of these technologies. In an effort to align the development, implementation, and scaling of AI to public values, scholars, policy-makers, and activists try to envision how these technologies can be democratized.