On Friday, 23 February, Lab Co-Director Arne Hintz was one of the panel speakers at The Big AI Debate – an evening event organised by The Liverpool City Region Civic Data Cooperative at the University of Liverpool. The debate assembled several experts on AI, democratic decision-making, and data ethics, and it explored how AI can meet the needs of society and how the various potential harms of AI use can be avoided. Most importantly, it asked who gets to decide how AI is used, for what purposes and in what ways, and how it impacts our communities. Arne highlighted the need for civic participation in decision-making about AI, particularly involving affected and marginalised communities, and he addressed insights from the Lab’s recent projects Towards Democratic Auditing: Civic Participation in the Scoring Society and Democratising the Datafied Society.

Just a month before, on 16 January, Arne discussed findings from this ongoing thread of the Data Justice Lab’s work at University of Bremen, Germany. In a presentation titled “Deciding about Communicative AI: Governance, Participation and Social Justice” he explored avenues towards involving the public as well as impacted communities in public policy and governmental decisions about the roll-out of AI systems.