Black Box or Pandora’s Box? How Decisions About Organising Shape Participation and Inclusion in the Development and Use of AI Models
2 May 2024
16:00 -17:30
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Room W4.05 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our AI at Cambridge Judge Business School Seminar
Speaker: Dr Virginia Leavell, Cambridge Judge Business School
About the seminar topic
A growing body of research and commentary on the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in organisations bemoans the high levels of opacity associated with most machine learning models and calls for models whose inner-workings are more transparent to both developers and users. In pursuit of this goal, we explored how organisations could encourage more participation and inclusion of diverse groups in the development and use of AI models at the fine-tuning stage. Our year-long field study of 2 metropolitan planning organisations in the Western United States revealed very different choices about how to organise around the development and implementation of AI models.
The data did indeed reveal how an organisation could make decisions that simultaneously broadened participation in the development of AI models and do so in a way that allowed new participants to actually see into the black box. But surprisingly, the data also showed that when members of key groups were able to contribute directly to the model’s development and could understand what it was doing and why (all qualities of transparency), they pushed for their own interests at the expense of community goals, debated ancillary topics, and stymied the very process for which the model was deployed. These findings caution us to consider how prying the lid off of the black box of AI models can create a Pandora’s box of problems for decision making and planning. We argue that models cannot simply be made more transparent because opacity is not a quality inherent in an AI model, but an emergent process that arises from people’s experience actively constructing its working.
Speaker bio
Virginia is an Assistant Professor in Organisational Theory and Information Systems at Cambridge Judge Business School. Before returning to academia to study technology, work and organisations, Virginia worked for more than a decade as a political organiser, educator, fundraiser, and consultant for non-profits and labour organisations in the US and Thailand. In her previous career she founded several organisations and businesses, including a popular education and retreat centre in rural Virginia and Washington DC-based political consultancy.
Virginia studies the relationship between organisational anticipation and digital technologies. In her research she asks 2 questions:
- How do organisations use digital technologies to predict and plan for the future?
- How do ideas and information about the future influence organisational structure and action in advance of technological change?
Virginia holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Georgetown University, an MA in Sociology from the University of California Santa Barbara, and a PhD in Technology Management from the University of California Santa Barbara.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.