Reimagining AI: Exploring Speculative Design Workshops for Supporting BIPOC Youth Critical AI Literacies
4 hours ago 4 hours agoBackground: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystems become increasingly entangled within our everyday lives, designing systems that are ethical, inclusive, and socially just is more vital than ever. It is well known that AI can have algorithmic biases that reflect, extend, and exacerbate our existing systemic injustices. Yet, despite most teenagers interacting with AI daily, only few have the opportunity to learn how it works and more importantly its socio-technical complexities. This is a particularly salient issue for communities that have been historically marginalized in technology discourse. Not only are BIPOC teens misrepresented throughout AI development and implementation, but they are also significantly less likely to receive STEAM education.
Method: In response to these unprecedented socio-technical challenges and calls for more critical approaches to child-centered AI design and education, we explore how we can leverage co-speculative design practices to help scaffold BIPOC youth critiques of existing AI systems and support the critical re-imagining of more just AI futures. Drawing on Haraway’s concepts of Situated Knowledges and Speculative Fabulations, these workshops aim to highlight the unique ways in which historically marginalized youth perceive AI as having social and ethical implications and how they envision alternative worlds with AI. The ability to challenge dominant discourse and envision how future AI implementations may impact society are key competencies of critical digital literacy; however, the use of tangible world building approaches to speculative design and critical AI literacies have been relatively under -explored in CCI.
Conventionally, mapping involves the delineating boundaries, control, and ownership. This process often conveys a symbolic representations of relationships among objects, actors, and space; consequently, serving as a tool for constructing knowledge and shaping reality. Historically, cartography has been used for political domination and colonial endeavors. We appropriate and subvert this practice as means of ontological and epistemological world-building and a tool for counter-storying alternative AI realities. This ongoing work uses the openness of speculative cartography as a catalyst for reflection, disorientation, and the reimagination of how we could co-exist with “intelligent” systems in a world absent of techno-capitalist values.
Our case study describes three 2-hour sessions of a larger 8-week Black-led AI STEAM program. In-person sessions include a combination of hands-on, speculative, and participatory learning activities that focus on AI ethics. Drawing on pre-post surveys, workshop recordings, and field notes, we provide initial insights on the following research questions:
- How do youth (grades 9-12) belonging to minority backgrounds perceive the social and ethical implications of their everyday AI technologies?
- In what ways can co-speculative design workshops help youth to cultivate critical AI literacies?
- In what ways can co-speculative design workshops support the reimagination of alternative AI realities?
Contribution: The contributions of this work will be 1) a discussion of how youth perceive AI as having social and ethical implications; 2) an exploration and nuanced understanding of how speculative approaches can be leveraged to support children’s engagement with complex socio-technological issues; and 3) enable youth to take ownership of and critically reflect on the socio-political implications of their own AI designs. Overall, we hope these workshops can empower youth to take on new bias towards action, resistance, and collective dreaming.
Kenny, S., & Antle, A. N. (2024, May 11–16). Reimagining AI: Exploring speculative design workshops for supporting BIPOC youth critical AI literacies [Workshop session]. CHI 2024 Workshop on Child-Centred AI Design, Honolulu, HI, United States. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08740
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