Contestable Camera Cars: A Speculative Design Exploration of Public AI That Is Open and Responsive to Dispute

TL;DR

This paper explores the design of publicly accessible AI systems in urban environments, focusing on contestability to ensure human rights are respected, through speculative design and interviews with city officials.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for contestable AI in public systems and demonstrates its application via a speculative design of camera cars, highlighting implementation challenges.

Findings

Civic participation faces representation issues

Public AI should align with democratic practices

Cities need to expand capacities for responsible AI

Abstract

Local governments increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) for automated decision-making. Contestability, making systems responsive to dispute, is a way to ensure they respect human rights to autonomy and dignity. We investigate the design of public urban AI systems for contestability through the example of camera cars: human-driven vehicles equipped with image sensors. Applying a provisional framework for contestable AI, we use speculative design to create a concept video of a contestable camera car. Using this concept video, we then conduct semi-structured interviews with 17 civil servants who work with AI employed by a large northwestern European city. The resulting data is analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to identify the main challenges facing the implementation of contestability in public AI. We describe how civic participation faces issues of representation, public AI systems should integrate with existing democratic practices, and cities must expand capacities for responsible AI development and operation.