Modes of Ambiguity: The Consequences of AI Tool Development on Professional Expertise

About the seminar topic

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools increasingly involves the professionals whose expertise these tools are meant to emulate. While this trend raises questions about the nature of expertise, this paper asks a more fundamental question: how is expertise redefined when professionals participate in the development of AI tools and with what consequences? Drawing on a 13-month ethnographic study of an elite teaching hospital in China, I compare the work of trainees involved in labelling clinical data for training AI tools, with the work of trainees and clinicians engaging in patient care. My analysis shows that the labelling work of trainees bypassed colligation, the interpretive process of constructing diagnostic meaning in expert work and trained trainees to suppress ambiguity. In contrast, clinicians frequently encountered ambiguity they could not resolve and instead engaged it interpretively. The trainees’ adoption of a factory-like approach to labelling data altered how expertise was both understood and enacted in their work. I develop new theory to illustrate how AI development can inadvertently undermine the very expertise it seeks to emulate as labelling work alters how trainees interpret and contend with ambiguity in professional work.

Speaker bio

Bryan Spencer is an assistant professor at the Alberta School of Business. He is an organisational ethnographer and field researcher who has studied different contexts such as AI development at an elite teaching hospital in China and a distributed financial organisation engaging in cryptocurrency market manipulation online. Through this work, he seeks to understand how the development and use of emerging technologies influences work, occupations and organisations. His research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly and recognised with awards including the EGOS That’s Interesting! Paper Award. He earned his PhD in management from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.

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No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.