Reclaiming the Narrative
Months ago I got a text from a dear friend who works in finance, with a video she had seen on Instagram of an investor reporting on some of the things he had heard at the Davos Forum about artificial intelligence. “Everytime I see something about AI I think of you”, she said, intending for it to sound nicer than how I interpreted it, as someone who is concerned about, a bit fed up with, the hype and solutionism around it.
Fostering Collective Data Governance Conversations Through Storytelling
One of the many findings he shares in the video, that got my friend very interested and excited, is that researchers cannot seem to be able to train AI models to identify some everyday life consequences such as the fact that a pen will fall if let go. The reason for that, he adds, is that AI does not respond well to data on human senses like touch, smell and taste, and more training is needed.
My friend asked my opinion about it. I told her about how data is needed to train AI models, that this data is collected from us and processed and shared mainly without our knowledge, and that, ultimately, the end goal of all this cycle is to create profit for corporations from the Minority World. And I posed her a question: why would we go through all of that, put ourselves at risk of data dismuse and rights violations, continue to increase these companies revenues…all for an AI model to do something as democratic and universal, that even a child or someone who have not learnt about gravity understands, as acknowledging that a pen will fall if dropped? Simply put: how would this functionality make people’s lives better?
As someone from the outside of the data and AI field, she was shocked she had not thought of the implications, after being captured by the novelty and excitement of it all.
I, on the other hand, was shocked to be reminded how those who work on these issues are so far away in the conversations from those being targeted and impacted by these corporations.
That conversation took me on a reflection about how to move beyond academic papers and technical or extensive policy briefs to, hopefully, start to reach people who might be new to the lingo, but are experts in living it.
Speculative fiction — a term that includes science fiction, fantasy, and their many subgenres and siblings, such as alternate history, magical realism, weird fiction, and slipstream — offers us the opportunity to imagine other worlds, to explore ideas across relationships and time. Storytelling is at once both a simple, familiar tool and a complex one, for when we explore through a story, we must work with character and context and change.
From: Johnson, Amy. “Stories from (Un)Identified Worlds: A Speculative Anthology”. Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society’s Fall 2022 Research Sprint, “Digital Identity in Times of Crisis”, 2022.
Drawing from the work of my colleagues at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society’s Fall 2022 Research Sprint on digital ID did on using speculative fiction stories to foster reflection, and the educational potential of Rose Eveleth’s Welcome to Vanguard Estates, a choose your own path story, we decided to embark on a similar adventure.
We used the brainstorming ideas generated by the participants of our interactive session “Data to the people: reflecting on participation and inclusion in AI uses for healthcare”, held at the “Beyond Data Protection Conference: Regulating Information and Protection against Risks of the Digital Society,” gathered through the “futures wheel” method of participation.
Then, we linked the events of the story to real-life current events as a way of building connection between the audience and the characters.
As we reflected on the short story that emerged, we thought about how this could be used in classroom or discussion group contexts to draw out different issues, so we added some prompts for discussion as opportunities to foster collective conversations around data governance in lectures, workshops and among groups.
It is a very initial and experimental exercise. An attempt to fill the public knowledge gap left and exploited by tech corporations to perpetuate their political, economic and narrative power.
Hopefully, many more will come.