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. 2024 Jul;33(5):634-653.
doi: 10.1177/09636625231219853. Epub 2024 Jan 28.

Who are the publics engaging in AI?

Renée Sieber, Ana Brandusescu  1 , Abigail Adu-Daako  2 , Suthee Sangiambut  1
Affiliations

Who are the publics engaging in AI?

Renée Sieber et al. Public Underst Sci. 2024 Jul.

Abstract

Given the importance of public engagement in governments' adoption of artificial intelligence systems, artificial intelligence researchers and practitioners spend little time reflecting on who those publics are. Classifying publics affects assumptions and affordances attributed to the publics' ability to contribute to policy or knowledge production. Further complicating definitions are the publics' role in artificial intelligence production and optimization. Our structured analysis of the corpus used a mixed method, where algorithmic generation of search terms allowed us to examine approximately 2500 articles and provided the foundation to conduct an extensive systematic literature review of approximately 100 documents. Results show the multiplicity of ways publics are framed, by examining and revealing the different semantic nuances, affordances, political and expertise lenses, and, finally, a lack of definitions. We conclude that categorizing publics represents an act of power, politics, and truth-seeking in artificial intelligence.

Keywords: citizen; engagement; human-in-the-loop; participant; participation; public; stakeholder.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Overview of the structured literature analysis for corpus processing and interpretation.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Diversity of corpus. Classification count of articles per Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) Canada 2000 categorization. The X-axis corresponds to the count of articles and the Y-axis to the classification categories.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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