Participatory AI in AI Dev & Governance

Project One Liner: A Principled Approach and Case Studies on Participatory AI

Status: completed

Project Theme: policy safety governance

Project Areas: healthcare

Team: Ambreesh Parthasarathy, Aditya Phalnikar, Gokul S Krishnan, Ameen Jauhar and Balaraman Ravindran

Collaborators: Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy

Short Description: The widespread adoption of AI technologies in the public and private sectors has resulted in them significantly impacting the lives of people in new and unforeseen ways. Therefore it becomes important to inquire how their design, development and deployment takes place. Upon this inquiry, it is often seen that domain experts or persons who will be impacted by the deployment of these AI systems have little to no say in how they are designed and developed. Seeing this as a lacuna, this research study advances the premise that a participatory approach is beneficial (both practically and normatively) to building and using more responsible, safe, and human-centric AI systems. Normatively, it enhances the fairness of the process and empowers citizens in voicing concerns to systems that may heavily impact their lives. Practically, it provides developers with new avenues of information which will be beneficial to them in improving the quality of the AI algorithm. This project advances this argument first, by describing the life cycle of an AI system; second, by identifying criteria which may be used to identify relevant stakeholders for a participatory exercise; and third, by mapping relevant stakeholders to different stages of AI lifecycle. Overall, the process if incorporated, can result in effective, fair, inclusive and safe AI systems as real world solutions, especially in critical sectors.

Publication:

  1. Parthasarathy, A., A. Phalnikar, A. Jauhar, D. Somayajula, G. S. Krishnan, and B. Ravindran. "Participatory approaches in AI development and governance: a principled approach. 2024." URL: https://arxiv. org/abs/2407.13100.

  2. Parthasarathy, Ambreesh, Aditya Phalnikar, Gokul S. Krishnan, Ameen Jauhar, and Balaraman Ravindran. "Participatory approaches in AI development and governance: case studies." arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.13103 (2024).