Paper short abstract:

What do the problems of AI look like when accounted for from multiple practices? We present two methods for engaging AI practitioners in the study of AI controversiality, and we discuss the implications of these participatory approaches for the STS agenda, in terms of epistemology and methods.

Paper long abstract:

This study addresses how the production of accounts shapes the problems arising with AI technologies. As STS scholars have long shown, framings of technological problems and controversies play a key role in technological development. In the case of AI, we argue that there is a lack of participation in its problematisation, fostering a disempowering feeling towards its developments. We therefore sought to engage people participating in AI development in its account. What issues emerge when studying AI problems from a plurality of situated practices? What methods can this type of collective effort develop, aiming to what effects?

As part of the French Shaping AI project, we developed participatory approaches to engage “AI practitioners” in two different co-enquiries. The first gathered 25 French AI practitioners, grounding AI issues in the sensitive and practical dimension that sustains them (Ricci, Crépel and Gourlet, 2024). This allowed to elicit 17 problems across practices. The second addresses the problems arising in the applicative context of “Foncier Innovant”, a project to automate the land register at the French Ministry of Economics. Here, practitioners’ issues concern the transformation of cadastral work and its organization, the lack of administrative transparency, externalization, maintenance, matters of governance and technology evaluation in public administration.

These two experiments, their different scales and modes of enquiry, illustrate different ways in which STS can develop methods to diversify problems associated with AI. We argue that, weaving AI problems into the fabric of its deployments, such a participatory approach holds potential to re-politicise AI.