Humans of AI - Digital Due Process Clinic

January 2022 –

People in a pedestrian city area with scores above their heads.

Discussions about AI and automated systems tend to emphasize the need to take into account the lived experience of folks affected by these systems. Often summarily called ‘data subjects,’ these people have to live with credit scoring, predictive policing, and many other forms of computationally generated judgments on a daily basis. While this has been a noble goal, learning from these experiences has proven difficult. Data subjects are geographically distributed in ways that make it difficult to learn from them; they are not usually organized or have a voice in policy debates; in fact, they may not even be aware that automated systems were involved in a decision.

In this project, we collect and curate audio stories of people who feel treated unfairly by an automated system. A student erroneously flagged for plagiarism by an AI detector, a nurse who cannot override a sepsis warning that she knows is wrong, a home owner whose front yard turned into a traffic jam when Google Maps changed its directions. All these people can teach us a lot about automated systems—insights that we tend to miss if we keep focusing on regulators, engineers, and managers.

If you have a story you would like to share, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Current research team: