Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI: Avoiding Decoys in Pursuit of Accountability
The Project of AI is a world-building endeavor, wherein those who fund and develop AI systems both operate through and seek to sustain networks of power and wealth. As they expand their access to resources and configure our sociotechnical conditions, they benefit from the ways in which a suite of decoys animate scholars, critics, policymakers, journalists, and the public into co-constructing industry-empowering AI futures. Regardless of who constructs or nurtures them, these decoys often create the illusion of accountability while both masking the emerging political economies that the Project of AI has set into motion, and also contributing to the network-making power that is at the heart of the Project's extraction and exploitation. Drawing on literature at the intersection of communication, science and technology studies, and economic sociology, we examine how the Project of AI is constructed. We then explore five decoys that seemingly critique - but in actuality co-constitute - AI's emergent power relations and material political economy. We argue that advancing meaningful fairness or accountability in AI requires: 1) recognizing when and how decoys serve as a distraction, and 2) grappling directly with the material political economy of the Project of AI. Doing so will enable us to attend to the networks of power that make 'AI' possible, spurring new visions for how to realize a more just technologically entangled world.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Towards post-growth policymaking: Barriers and enablers for wellbeing economy and Doughnut economics government initiatives
Providing wellbeing for all while safeguarding planetary boundaries may require governments to pursue post-growth policies. To understand how post-growth policymaking can be fostered, we examine wellbeing economy and Dou…
Unveiling Biases in AI: ChatGPT's Political Economy Perspectives and Human Comparisons
We explore the political and ideological positioning of ChatGPT, a leading large language model (LLM), by comparing its responses to political economy questions from the European Social Survey (ESS). The questions concer…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelThe Impact of Geopolitical Conflicts on Trade, Growth, and Innovation
Geopolitical conflicts have increasingly been a driver of trade policy. We study the potential effects of global and persistent geopolitical conflicts on trade, technological innovation, and economic growth. In conventio…
Public Finance or Public Choice? The Scholastic Political Economy As an Essentialist Synthesis
Nowadays, it is thought that there are only two approaches to political economy: public finance and public choice; however, this research aims to introduce a new insight by investigating scholastic sources. We study the …
The Fake Friend Dilemma: Relational Trust and the Political Economy of Conversational AI
As conversational AI systems become a larger part of the media landscape, they raise questions about whose interests they serve and the risks they may pose to users. These systems do more than provide information: they i…