Whose Voice Counts? Mapping Stakeholder Perspectives on AI Through Public Submissions to the U.S. Government

TL;DR

This study analyzes public submissions to the US AI Action Plan to understand diverse stakeholder perspectives on AI, revealing differing concerns among groups and highlighting the private sector's dominant influence.

Contribution

It introduces a corpus cleaning pipeline and applies topic modeling to compare stakeholder perceptions and the focus of the AI policy document.

Findings

Individuals express strong concerns about AI's impact on life.

Other stakeholders focus more on AI development issues.

The AI Action Plan mainly reflects private sector concerns.

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more common in our daily lives, it is important to understand how different stakeholders comprehend and envisage the role that these technologies play in shaping social, political, and economic realities. In this paper, we investigate public perceptions of AI based on a corpus of letters submitted during the public consultation for the Trump Administration's US AI Action Plan. To this aim, we release a corpus cleaning pipeline and perform topic modelling and frequency analysis to explore predominant topics discussed by different subgroups (e.g., academia, individuals, private sector) and those appearing in the AI Action Plan. Our results show that individuals voice strong concerns related to the impact of AI on life, while other stakeholders are more concerned with AI development. Our comparison of topics suggests that the AI Action Plan reflects predominantly the concerns of the private sector on security, policies, and development, with individuals' concerns less represented.