Why AI Policy Needs Artists
By: Şerife, Sherry
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Policy, Mapping, Ethics, Art

Project announcement at casbs.stanford.edu.

Image: Francis Ruyter, The Double Garden, 2008 (Atoms for Peace Series)

Fluxus Landscape is a global map of AI ethics and governance that deliberately never defines what AI or ethics is. The 500 stakeholders represented on the map each have their own interpretation of what terms like responsible or trustworthy AI means, or even what AI itself means. We do not have a shared understanding of the issues. Fluxus Landscape proposes that these stakeholders are collectively building complex, and at times, conflicting infrastructure that will determine our relationship to AI.

Increasing divisions and methods on AI policy bring compromises, even in ideal circumstances. How much privacy are we willing to give up for public safety? Would we give up as much for making an AI system safer? These trade-offs are often made without the input of the groups most vulnerable to their impacts.

In one single, evolving image, the map connects us to the competing needs of the AI ethics ecosystem. Fluxus Landscape is a practical resource to find new partners or people to invite to conferences — but more importantly, it can also be experienced. It can change your mind or shape how you think about AI ethics over time. You may find policy gaps others might not be able to see; you might examine your beliefs and begin to understand different perspectives.

The stakeholders are categorized based on their own claims of what topics and activities they bring to the table. They are clustered together by categories such as civic impact, human rights, or autonomous weapons, even if they do not share the same definition or approach. For example, clustered together under “Privacy” are 115 elements, including Google (Alphabet), which lists privacy as one of their AI principles and the grassroots movement Block Sidewalk, which protests Alphabet’s smart city development plan. There are 63 elements categorized as labor and economy, 62 under technical safety,118 under frameworks and strategy, 43 listed as funding sources, and many more.

Thousands of questions are created by these clusters. What do the organizations fighting surveillance think of being grouped with corporations working on facial recognition? Are there patterns in what different countries are working on? What biases does this map reflect and how would yours be different? Each question discovered expands your understanding of the impact of AI on society.

Conventional approaches to regulating technology are not sufficient when it comes to AI: governing bodies are not able to move as fast as innovation. We will need creative policymakers and new economic models to face our uncertain future — and, we will need artists.

Artists bring an independent perspective and provide a different measure of impact and results than those who go by the numbers can. It is often the mistake, the naive observer’s comment, or the outsider’s view that triggers an unexpected breakthrough. The artist is a prototypical migrant (physically and otherwise) and in her social mobilization, can catalyze material into self-generating forms, and is well trained to recognize which directions these forms are taking.

In the coming year, there will be new initiatives launched to observe and analyze AI policy, including ones from the European Union and the OECD. These efforts are well-intentioned but will represent a specific worldview. How will we keep in mind the outliers that are not on their lists? How will we represent the Global South? Can we afford to miss out on the answers that come from different perspectives? Global governance of AI is orderly and identifiable only if we choose to limit it to an isolated segment such as international coordination for standards or a comparison of AI strategies between nations. This map asks you to consider a much messier reality.

With support from the community, this initial work will evolve into a counter-narrative observatory on AI governance. I hope to encourage many more organizations, researchers, and artists to work together on these issues. If our policies cannot keep up with AI, maybe art can.