Studying Up Public Sector AI: How Networks of Power Relations Shape Agency Decisions Around AI Design and Use
As public sector agencies rapidly introduce new AI tools in high-stakes domains like social services, it becomes critical to understand how decisions to adopt these tools are made in practice. We borrow from the anthropological practice to ``study up'' those in positions of power, and reorient our study of public sector AI around those who have the power and responsibility to make decisions about the role that AI tools will play in their agency. Through semi-structured interviews and design activities with 16 agency decision-makers, we examine how decisions about AI design and adoption are influenced by their interactions with and assumptions about other actors within these agencies (e.g., frontline workers and agency leaders), as well as those above (legal systems and contracted companies), and below (impacted communities). By centering these networks of power relations, our findings shed light on how infrastructural, legal, and social factors create barriers and disincentives to the involvement of a broader range of stakeholders in decisions about AI design and adoption. Agency decision-makers desired more practical support for stakeholder involvement around public sector AI to help overcome the knowledge and power differentials they perceived between them and other stakeholders (e.g., frontline workers and impacted community members). Building on these findings, we discuss implications for future research and policy around actualizing participatory AI approaches in public sector contexts.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
VIRENA: Virtual Arena for Research, Education, and Democratic Innovation
Digital platforms shape how people communicate, deliberate, and form opinions. Studying these dynamics has become increasingly difficult due to restricted data access, ethical constraints on real-world experiments, and l…
Stories that (are) Move(d by) Markets: A Causal Exploration of Market Shocks and Semantic Shifts across Different Partisan Groups
Macroeconomic fluctuations and the narratives that shape them form a mutually reinforcing cycle: public discourse can spur behavioural changes leading to economic shifts, which then result in changes in the stories that …
Towards a Modular Ontology for Space Weather Research
The interactions between the Sun, interplanetary space, near Earth space environment, the Earth's surface, and the power grid are, perhaps unsurprisingly, very complicated. The study of such requires the collaboration be…
Data IntegrationPerceptions of AI Across Sectors: A Comparative Review of Public Attitudes
This paper offers a domain-mediated comparative review of 251 studies on public attitudes toward AI, published between 2011 and 2025. Drawing on a systematic literature review, we analyse how different factors including …
Autonomous VehiclesLegacy Procurement Practices Shape How U.S. Cities Govern AI: Understanding Government Employees' Practices, Challenges, and Needs
Most AI tools adopted by governments are not developed internally, but instead are acquired from third-party vendors in a process called public procurement. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical study of how Unit…
Decision Making