Despite the proliferation of explainable AI (XAI) methods, little is understood about end-users’ explainability needs and behaviors around XAI explanations. To address this gap and contribute to understanding how explainability can support human-AI interaction, we conducted a mixed-methods study with 20 end-users of a real-world AI application, the Merlin bird identification app, and inquired about their XAI needs, uses, and perceptions. We found that participants desire practically useful information that can improve their collaboration with the AI, more so than technical system details. Relatedly, participants intended to use XAI explanations for various purposes beyond understanding the AI’s outputs: calibrating trust, improving their task skills, changing their behavior to supply better inputs to the AI, and giving constructive feedback to developers. Finally, among existing XAI approaches, participants preferred part-based explanations that resemble human reasoning and explanations. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for future XAI design.

Through intensive research on datasets, benchmarks, and models, the computer-vision community has taken great strides to identify the societal biases intrinsic to these technologies. Less is known about the last mile of the computer-vision machine-learning pipeline: on-the-ground integration into the real world. In this paper, I analyze facial verification technology (FVT) through its use as account verification in ride-hail work. Using a sociotechnical framework combined with empirical qualitative research methods, including interviews and analysis of an online community of workers, this research is a deep dive into recognition technologies at the level of local practice. Findings reveal the high-stakes articulation labor demanded of workers to be recognized by these systems, including maintaining multiple mobile devices, repeatedly uploading requisite images, spending time and resources visiting customer-service centers, and making physical changes to their bodies and environments. These strategies constitute repairs to the failures of computer vision in dynamic environments and are required to successfully engage in the sociotechnical interaction protocols demanded by FVT. Drawing on Erving Goffman's terminology around social interaction rituals, I term these cognitive and behavioral negotiations "face work." Drivers' dynamic, responsive, and ad-hoc attempts to become machine-readable have significant implications for relations between identity and power in spaces of security and work, as well as for the integration of machine-learning systems into safety-critical infrastructures. Ultimately, this research emphasizes the crucial role of end users who create and maintain the conditions required for computer vision to produce judgment.

Scholars and industry practitioners have debated how to best develop interventions for ethical artificial intelligence (AI). Such interventions recommend that companies building and using AI tools change their technical practices, but fail to wrangle with critical questions about the organizational and institutional context in which AI is developed. In this paper, we contribute descriptive research around the life of "AI" as a discursive concept and organizational practice in an understudied sphere--emerging AI startups--and with a focus on extra-organizational pressures faced by entrepreneurs. Leveraging a theoretical lens for how organizations change, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 entrepreneurs working at early-stage AI startups. We find that actors within startups both conform to and resist institutional pressures. Our analysis identifies a central tension for AI entrepreneurs: they often valued scientific integrity and methodological rigor; however, influential external stakeholders either lacked the technical knowledge to appreciate entrepreneurs' emphasis on rigor or were more focused on business priorities. As a result, entrepreneurs adopted hyped marketing messages about AI that diverged from their scientific values, but attempted to preserve their legitimacy internally. Institutional pressures and organizational constraints also influenced entrepreneurs' modeling practices and their response to actual or impending regulation. We conclude with a discussion for how such pressures could be used as leverage for effective interventions towards building ethical AI.

We investigate the privacy practices of labor organizers in the computing technology industry and explore the changes in these practices as a response to remote work. Our study is situated at the intersection of two pivotal shifts in workplace dynamics: (a) the increase in online workplace communications due to remote work, and (b) the resurgence of the labor movement and an increase in collective action in workplaces-especially in the tech industry, where this phenomenon has been dubbed the tech worker movement. The shift of work-related communications to online digital platforms in response to an increase in remote work is creating new opportunities for and risks to the privacy of workers. These risks are especially significant for organizers of collective action, with several well-publicized instances of retaliation against labor organizers by companies. Through a series of qualitative interviews with 29 tech workers involved in collective action, we investigate how labor organizers assess and mitigate risks to privacy while engaging in these actions. Among the most common risks that organizers experienced are retaliation from their employer, lateral worker conflict, emotional burnout, and the possibility of information about the collective effort leaking to management. Depending on the nature and source of the risk, organizers use a blend of digital security practices and community-based mechanisms. We find that digital security practices are more relevant when the threat comes from management, while community management and moderation are central to protecting organizers from lateral worker conflict. Since labor organizing is a collective rather than individual project, individual privacy and collective privacy are intertwined, sometimes in conflict and often mutually constitutive. Notions of privacy that solely center individuals are often incompatible with the needs of organizers, who noted that safety in numbers could only be achieved when workers presented a united front to management. Based on our interviews, we identify key topics for future research, such as the growing prevalence of surveillance software and the needs of international and gig worker organizers.We conclude with design recommendations that can help create safer, more secure and more private tools to better address the risks that organizers face.

Algorithmic decision-making and decision-support systems (ADS) are gaining influence over how society distributes resources, administers justice, and provides access to opportunities. Yet collectively we do not adequately study how these systems affect people or document the actual or potential harms resulting from their integration with important social functions. This is a significant challenge for computational justice efforts of measuring and governing AI systems. Impact assessments are often used as instruments to create accountability relationships and grant some measure of agency and voice to communities affected by projects with environmental, financial, and human rights ramifications. Applying these tools-through Algorithmic Impact Assessments (AIA)-is a plausible way to establish accountability relationships for ADSs. At the same time, what an AIA would entail remains under-specified; they raise as many questions as they answer. Choices about the methods, scope, and purpose of AIAs structure the conditions of possibility for AI governance. In this paper, we present our research on the history of impact assessments across diverse domains, through a sociotechnical lens, to present six observations on how they co-constitute accountability. Decisions about what type of effects count as an impact; when impacts are assessed; whose interests are considered; who is invited to participate; who conducts the assessment; how assessments are made publicly available, and what the outputs of the assessment might be; all shape the forms of accountability that AIAs engender. Because AlAs are still an incipient governance strategy, approaching them as social constructions that do not require a single or universal approach offers a chance to produce interventions that emerge from careful deliberation.

Journalistic work is increasingly conducted using cooperative technologies. But while journalists need security and privacy just like professionals in sectors like health and education, constrained finances and missing legal requirements cause journalists to rely mostly on third-party platforms for their professional communications. In this study, we analyze how journalists manage professional collaborations across myriad tasks and contexts, with a focus on how their security and privacy concerns may shape these behaviors. We find that journalists' relatively open information-sharing practices may reflect the strength of their informal intra-organizational networks, rather than their organizational commitment per se. Moreover, while journalists' like many workers' manage their security and privacy concerns by avoiding sensitive communications via certain channels, the physical shrinking newsrooms of is reducing opportunities for the face-to-face communications journalists rely on for secure, private, professional exchange. Journalists' self-censorship on collaborative platforms therefore warrants particular attention given journalism's essential role in the public sphere.