By Tania Duarte
At We and AI we have been working on several projects based around decoding and unpicking the AI hype narratives, framing, words and pictures that are used to legitimise AI which does not work for public good.
One narrative we have found to be most insidious is one used to disempower anyone who challenges the way AI is being designed and used, or asks if AI is really the solution to everything. This is the narrative of unstoppability and inevitability.
Apparently, the cat is out of the bag, the genie is out of the bottle, the train has left the station, and the horse has bolted when it comes to giving over our power, time, data, jobs, creativity, land, dignity, jobs, and even sanity to huge commercial companies and their leaders and political allies. The narrative dictates that now our only option is to make sure that we individually are the ones who suffer least. We must do this by embracing AI, upskilling, and making sure we don’t get left behind. And the best we can do for our communities is see if we can drag some others along with us.
However, AI is not an unstoppable force like an earthquake or a hurricane; it is part of a system we have collectively enabled, and which needs our collective participation to continue. And indeed there are many people, communities, and organisations who are proving that not only are there no foregone conclusions, there are better ways to do things – and better imaginations to live in than those of a handful of sociopathic billionaires. The problem is that their voices and challenges are too often drowned out by the AI hype that billions of dollars can buy.
That’s why it was important to us to surface the counter-narratives to inevitability, and the alternative visions of what a positive future for people and planet could look like. We want them to inspire others to explore the multitude of different actions that are possible to demand tech which works for people, not profit, whatever their circumstances are.
As such, over the last year, we have been researching case studies of different types of challenges to the ways AI is being used and the infrastructure and labour practices required to build it.
From the patterns which emerged, it became clear that there was a wide range of approaches, which sometimes intersected and overlapped in terms of ideology, focus and motivation, and sometimes did not.
They ranged from mundane, personal, everyday refusals, to planned and large scale activism, tech or creative projects.
What they all have in common is the rejection of the call to simply give up and give in.
These have been summarised as:
With support from our wider community, along with coauthors at We and AI Ismael Kherroubi Garcia, Ramla Anshur, Dylan Orchard, Harriet Humfress and Steph Wright, I have written up a suggested framework for mapping challenges as a preprint research paper, which can be accessed here.
As well as asking for feedback, we are also looking for partners who can help us build this framework out into a public interactive database of counterinevitability projects, surfacing the resistance, refusal, reclaiming and reimagining projects for others to take inspiration from and connect with related projects. From our work building up the Better Images of AI project, we know the power of collaboration, partnerships and shared ideas.
Please get in touch at research@weandai.org if you would like to join our database project, or submit your own project. Together we can chip away at the disempowering narrative of extractive AI inevitability.