The Cloud Weaving Model for AI development
This provides a novel framework for responsible AI development with marginalized communities, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing social and indigenous knowledge.
The paper tackles the challenge of expressing AI development issues with marginalized communities by constructing the Cloud Weaving Model, an alternative conceptual framework grounded in social fabric, and applies it to highlight neglected dimensions in co-creation pilots.
While analysing challenges in pilot projects developing AI with marginalized communities, we found it difficult to express them within commonly used paradigms. We therefore constructed an alternative conceptual framework to ground AI development in the social fabric -- the Cloud Weaving Model -- inspired (amongst others) by indigenous knowledge, motifs from nature, and Eastern traditions. This paper introduces and elaborates on the fundamental elements of the model (clouds, spiders, threads, spiderwebs, and weather) and their interpretation in an AI context. The framework is then applied to comprehend patterns observed in co-creation pilots approaching marginalized communities, highlighting neglected yet relevant dimensions for responsible AI development.