Secondary Stakeholders in AI: Fighting for, Brokering, and Navigating Agency
This work addresses the gap in participatory AI for secondary stakeholders, such as data contributors and activists, but is incremental as it builds on existing participatory frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of excluding secondary stakeholders from participatory AI development by identifying three participatory ideals—informedness, consent, and agency—through interviews, and introduces stakeholder archetypes to highlight systemic barriers.
As AI technologies become more human-facing, there have been numerous calls to adapt participatory approaches to AI development -- spurring the idea of participatory AI. However, these calls often focus only on primary stakeholders, such as end-users, and not secondary stakeholders. This paper seeks to translate the ideals of participatory AI to a broader population of secondary AI stakeholders through semi-structured interviews. We theorize that meaningful participation involves three participatory ideals: (1) informedness, (2) consent, and (3) agency. We also explore how secondary stakeholders realize these ideals by traversing a complicated problem space. Like walking up the rungs of a ladder, these ideals build on one another. We introduce three stakeholder archetypes: the reluctant data contributor, the unsupported activist, and the well-intentioned practitioner, who must navigate systemic barriers to achieving agentic AI relationships. We envision an AI future where secondary stakeholders are able to meaningfully participate with the AI systems they influence and are influenced by.