Secondary Stakeholders in AI: Fighting for, Brokering, and Navigating Agency

TL;DR

This paper explores how secondary stakeholders in AI can achieve meaningful participation by examining their roles, barriers, and agency through interviews, proposing a broader participatory AI framework beyond primary users.

Contribution

It introduces a new participatory AI framework focusing on secondary stakeholders, identifying key ideals and archetypes, and analyzing systemic barriers to agency.

Findings

Secondary stakeholders face systemic barriers to participation.

Three archetypes of secondary stakeholders are identified.

Participatory ideals build sequentially from informedness to agency.

Abstract

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.