How Do We Involve People in AI Decision-Making? Towards Effective Participatory AI Designs

Vijay Keswani, Duke University.

The expanding capabilities of AI come with a surge in the reports of societal and personal harms related to its use. Examples range from systemic biases in AI decision-aid tools in healthcare and policing to stereotype propagation in AI-based search and translation tools. Technical research on mitigating such harms forward certain solutions to ensure that AI behavior is aligned with ethical norms and values. Yet, this research leaves unanswered the question of “whose norms are followed” and can fail to counter AI harms when there is a disparity between the assumed ethical norms and the values of the people impacted by AI. But what if there was a way for the stakeholders (e.g., AI users or domain experts) to tell us how an AI tool should ideally operate?

In this talk, I will argue for democratizing how we build AI tools and undertaking a participatory approach to AI assessment and development. By eliciting feedback from relevant stakeholders on the harms they observe and the outcomes they expect, AI models can be aligned with the expressed stakeholder values. We will see concrete illustrations of such participatory mechanisms for image search audits, multi-winner elections, and medical decision-making. Across these applications, certain features of participation in AI will become clear: (a) participatory designs are domain-specific, (b) their efficacy relies heavily on the effectiveness of mechanisms used for eliciting stakeholder preferences, and (c) (when done right) they enhance user agency and trust in AI tools.

Vijay Keswani is a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University. His research interests center around community-focused AI development and the ethics of data and technology. His work leverages tools from various disciplines to build robust AI models, combining computational and statistical learning mechanisms with methods from law, philosophy, psychology, and economics. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2023. While at Yale, he was a Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project during 2022-2023 and a 2022 Policy Fellow at the Yale Institute for Social and Policy Studies.