[Air-L] Call for Abstracts: Panel on AI Imaginaries for #AoIR2024

[Natalia Stanusch]

Dear All,

We are writing to inquire if any of you are currently engaged in research or projects related to AI imaginaries. If so, would you like to join forces for a panel on AI Imaginaries for #AoIR2024?

Below please find the panel call. We would like to receive your 1,000-word abstract by February 16th.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at n.b.stanusch at uva.nl<mailto:n.b.stanusch at uva.nl> and  R.A.Rogers at uva.nl<mailto:R.A.Rogers at uva.nl>.

Best regards,

Natalia Stanusch
Richard Rogers
Media Studies
University of Amsterdam

Panel proposal: AI Industry Expectations and Underperforming Imaginaries
Convenors: Natalia Stanusch and Richard Rogers (University of Amsterdam)

AI industry expectations from labor-savings and helpful, harmless automation but also media manipulation and existential threat currently represent dominant strands of the discourse. But what of the counter-imaginaries? The panel takes up AoIR’s theme of how industry pre-mediates the future of internet technology and its effects and inquires into alternatives. How can we utilize ideas from controversy and issue mapping as well as from the study of sociotechnical imaginaries and develop further the study of counter-imaginaries to critically survey, analyze, and reimagine artificial intelligence (AI) within and beyond the AI industry? We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions that locate, map and critically examine AI imaginaries together with counter-imaginaries that engage with and intervene in those of the AI industry.

As both Bruno Latour (2005) and Sheila Jasanoff (2013) have argued, albeit with somewhat different thrusts, there are certain moments in the course of technology development when for its critical study it is especially doable to map debate and appropriate to invoke the notion of imaginaries. It is when an industry and science are in palpable motion, not quite stabilized. It is also when controversies concerning failures or accidents prompt actor positioning and when visions of desirable trajectories and impacts compete. These are instances when it is opportune to undertake mappings.

This panel seeks to take this analytical opportunity to map the discursive landscape of AI technology developments, welcoming multiple approaches to do so. The mapping approach, from controversy and issue mapping (Venturini & Munk, 2021; Rogers et al., 2015), would place emphasis on how actor associations, both discursive as well as through connective action, assemble agendas and build worlds. The imaginaries point of departure focuses on how visions are articulated and performed, together with the kinds of social orders they promote and cement. Other approaches are also welcome.

The panel also responds to invitations to map the AI industry (Crawford 2021), such as an extraction industry. The AI pipeline, so to speak, relies on raw materials and finished products, such as edited newspaper articles. Some of these materials become visible through traces, such as when Reddit turns up in Google autocompletion or periodical titles appear in AI platform responses. Guardrails (or injection guards) seek to wipe these remnants of training materials, so their trace mapping is challenging.

The panel is also interested in the part played by so-called Big Tech. As stated in the recent report by the AI Now Institute, “there is no AI without Big Tech” (Kak & West, 2023). The related magazine article had as its headline: ‘Make no mistake—AI is owned by Big Tech’ (Kak et al., 2023). Reference here is made especially to chatty large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, which recently have become inseparable terminologically from AI. A Big Tech framework for considering how it guides AI would include the study of beta releases, which enable its assessments and harms to be identified by users ex post rather than by the company a priori (Marres 2017). Another would be the application of commercial content moderation (Roberts 2019; Gillespie 2018), where low-wage, outsourced laborers are tasked with removing undesirable content.

There are also policy linkages and imaginaries shared by actors to be mapped. As Big Tech, does the relatively centralized AI industry share interests in similar regulatory policies and narratives? Where self-regulation once was a refrain of industry, now there are invitations for regulators to step in. How does industry imagine regulation?

This call for abstracts is thus a response to engage in the study of AI as new media concentration (Bode & Goodlad, 2023). While reassembling how Big Tech’s imaginaries may be stabilizing, the more normative question concerns the monopoly position. How to map out the alternatives to Big Tech’s visions of AI? By employing the notion of counter-imaginaries of AI, we are interested in a variety of temporal and spatial framings. With respect to temporalities, we are interested in ‘horizons talk’ and how time chunking of the future marks discourse. A shifting of the space of debate and imagination is also fruitful. Where are AI futures distinctive from the extractive, Big Tech trajectory?

We seek contributions that engage with mapping AI imaginaries and counter-imaginaries on both methodological and conceptual levels. Some of the possible topics include but are not limited to:

·         Past, contemporary, and emerging mappings of AI imaginaries and visions of the future
·         Sector specific (e.g. LLMs, facial recognition, chat bots), process specific (e.g. data labeling, training, deployment of models), or industry-wide AI imaginaries
·         Resistance practices to industry-driven AI imaginaries and counter-imaginaries of AI
·         Critical studies of AI industry’s marketing material and business talk
·         Folk theories around AI and people’s AI imaginaries
·         Digital research methods for mapping AI imaginaries
·         Global AI imaginaries from outside of Silicon Valley
·         Historical and media archeological AI imaginaries
·         AI-related visuality and image studies
·         Identity and AI imaginaries
·         Studies of fiction and works of art engaging with AI and AI processes

Individual submissions to the panel should include an extended abstract of  1000-1200 words (excluding reference list) for each of the constituent papers in the standard AoIR paper submission template. Please let us know if you are interested in participating. The abstracts are due on February 16th and can be sent to both n.b.stanusch at uva.nl<mailto:n.b.stanusch at uva.nl> and R.A.Rogers at uva.nl<mailto:R.A.Rogers at uva.nl>.

References
Bode, K. and Goodlad, L. M. E. (2023). “Data Worlds: An Introduction.” In Critical AI (2023) 1(1-2). 10.1215/2834703X-10734026.

Crawford, K. (2021. The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.

Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale University Press

Jasanoff, S. (2015) “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity.” In Jasanoff, S. and Kim,S.-H. (eds), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, University of Chicago Press.

Jasanoff, S. and Kim, S. (2013). “Sociotechnical Imaginaries and National Energy Policies.” Science as Culture. 22, pp. 189-196. 10.1080/09505431.2013.786990.
Kak, A, West, S. M., and Whittaker, M. (December 5, 2023). “Make no mistake—AI is owned by Big Tech.” MIT Technology Review.
Kak, A. and West, S. M. (April 11, 2023). “AI Now 2023 Landscape: Confronting Tech Power”, AI Now Institute.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social – An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press.

Marres N. (2017). Digital Sociology: The Reinvention of Social Research. Polity Press.

Roberts, S. T. Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media. Yale University Press, 2019.

Rogers, R., Sánchez-Querubín, N., and Kil, A. (2015). Issue Mapping for an Ageing Europe. Amsterdam University Press.

Venturini, T. and Munk, A. K. (2022). Controversy Mapping: A Field Guide. Polity Press.