Empowering Local Communities Using Artificial Intelligence
It addresses the problem of AI deployment in multi-stakeholder local contexts for community empowerment, but it is incremental as it builds on existing co-creation practices without introducing new technical methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of using AI-powered systems to engage local communities in addressing societal and environmental concerns, highlighting mismatched expectations among stakeholders and advocating for co-creation approaches to bridge AI research with citizen needs.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to analyze large amounts of data in various practices, such as object recognition. We are specifically interested in using AI-powered systems to engage local communities in developing plans or solutions for pressing societal and environmental concerns. Such local contexts often involve multiple stakeholders with different and even contradictory agendas, resulting in mismatched expectations of these systems' behaviors and desired outcomes. There is a need to investigate if AI models and pipelines can work as expected in different contexts through co-creation and field deployment. Based on case studies in co-creating AI-powered systems with local people, we explain challenges that require more attention and provide viable paths to bridge AI research with citizen needs. We advocate for developing new collaboration approaches and mindsets that are needed to co-create AI-powered systems in multi-stakeholder contexts to address local concerns.