Enabling Value Sensitive AI Systems through Participatory Design Fictions

TL;DR

This paper explores participatory design fictions as a novel method to incorporate human values into AI systems, emphasizing user-centered value inquiry and stakeholder engagement for more ethically aligned AI development.

Contribution

It introduces participatory design fictions as an innovative approach to study and integrate user values into AI systems, bridging HCI methods with AI development practices.

Findings

Preliminary case study results demonstrate the effectiveness of design fictions in eliciting user values.

Participatory design fictions facilitate stakeholder engagement in AI value alignment.

The approach supports understanding domain-specific and stakeholder-specific values in AI systems.

Abstract

Two general routes have been followed to develop artificial agents that are sensitive to human values---a top-down approach to encode values into the agents, and a bottom-up approach to learn from human actions, whether from real-world interactions or stories. Although both approaches have made exciting scientific progress, they may face challenges when applied to the current development practices of AI systems, which require the under-standing of the specific domains and specific stakeholders involved. In this work, we bring together perspectives from the human-computer interaction (HCI) community, where designing technologies sensitive to user values has been a longstanding focus. We highlight several well-established areas focusing on developing empirical methods for inquiring user values. Based on these methods, we propose participatory design fictions to study user values involved in AI systems and present preliminary results from a case study. With this paper, we invite the consideration of user-centered value inquiry and value learning.