Kars Alfrink

One farmer asked Clemens Driessen it pigs would enjoy the sorts of video games her kids play on their Nintendo Wii. The suggestion drove the philosopher to contact the Utrecht School of the Arts to collaborate on video games for pigs. It started out as a way to relieve the boredom of pigs awaiting slaughter. But game design initiative Playing with Pigs quickly evolved to become something more than a simple video game that gets humans to 'play with their food'. Designing a game on a farm with pigs generated ambivalent responses with both human and nonhuman potential users. As 'multispecies philosophy', the genre of interspecies video games is explored for changing our experiences of subjectivity, mind and community.

As the use of AI systems continues to increase, so do concerns over their lack of fairness, legitimacy and accountability. Such harmful automated decision-making can be guarded against by ensuring AI systems are contestable by design: responsive to human intervention throughout the system lifecycle. Contestable AI by design is a small but growing field of research. However, most available knowledge requires a significant amount of translation to be applicable in practice. A proven way of conveying intermediate-level, generative design knowledge is in the form of frameworks. In this article we use qualitative-interpretative methods and visual mapping techniques to extract from the literature sociotechnical features and practices that contribute to contestable AI, and synthesize these into a design framework.

The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) by public actors has led to a push for more transparency. Previous research has conceptualized AI transparency as knowledge that empowers citizens and experts to make informed choices about the use and governance of AI. Conversely, in this paper, we critically examine if transparency-as-knowledge is an appropriate concept for a public realm where private interests intersect with democratic concerns. We conduct a practice-based design research study in which we prototype and evaluate a transparent smart electric vehicle charge point, and investigate experts’ and citizens’ understanding of AI transparency. We find that citizens experience transparency as burdensome; experts hope transparency ensures acceptance, while citizens are mostly indifferent to AI; and with absent means of control, citizens question transparency’s relevance. The tensions we identify suggest transparency cannot be reduced to a product feature, but should be seen as a mediator of debate between experts and citizens.