Understanding Frontline Workers' and Unhoused Individuals' Perspectives on AI Used in Homeless Services
This addresses the problem of understanding stakeholder concerns in AI deployment for homeless services, though it is incremental as it applies an adapted method to a specific domain.
The study investigated stakeholder perspectives on an AI decision-support system used in homeless services, finding that frontline workers, service providers, and unhoused individuals could provide specific and critical feedback on system design and deployment when empowered through methods like AI lifecycle comicboarding.
Recent years have seen growing adoption of AI-based decision-support systems (ADS) in homeless services, yet we know little about stakeholder desires and concerns surrounding their use. In this work, we aim to understand impacted stakeholders' perspectives on a deployed ADS that prioritizes scarce housing resources. We employed AI lifecycle comicboarding, an adapted version of the comicboarding method, to elicit stakeholder feedback and design ideas across various components of an AI system's design. We elicited feedback from county workers who operate the ADS daily, service providers whose work is directly impacted by the ADS, and unhoused individuals in the region. Our participants shared concerns and design suggestions around the AI system's overall objective, specific model design choices, dataset selection, and use in deployment. Our findings demonstrate that stakeholders, even without AI knowledge, can provide specific and critical feedback on an AI system's design and deployment, if empowered to do so.