ethics

Coproduction, Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: A Perspective from Cultural Anthropology

ABSTRACT

Over the past five years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been endorsed as the technical underpinning of innovation. Sensationalist representations of AI have also been accompanied by assumptions of technological determinism that distract from the ordinary, sometimes unassuming consequences of interaction with its systems and processes. Drawing on scholarship from cultural anthropology, along with science and technology studies (STS), this paper examines coproduction in a Canadian AI research and development context. Through interview responses and field observations it presents sites of sociotechnical entanglement and ethical discussion to highlight potential spaces of mediation for anthropological practice. Emerging themes from the experiences of AI specialists include the negotiability of technology, an ethics of the everyday and critical collaboration. Together this returns to an initial approach into a situated understanding of artificial intelligence, negotiating with broad, sensationalist perspectives and the more commonplace, backgrounded cases of narrow research.

Three Lies of Digital Ethnography

ABSTRACT

The relative novelty of digital ethnography as a research methodology, along with the challenges that it moves to classical understandings of fieldwork, participation and representation, results in a repertoire of professional illusions through which digital ethnographers justify their work when confronted with the disciplinary culture of anthropology. This essay is based on the author’s reflexive experience of researching digital media use in China, and updates Gary Alan Fine’s 1993 article “Ten Lies of Ethnography” by identifying three lies of digital ethnography. Illustrating each of these lies through an archetypal figure – the ‘networked field-weaver’, the ‘eager participant-lurker’ and the ‘expert fabricator’ – this article argues for the need to confront methodological illusions and embrace the tensions behind them as useful heuristics for conducting ethnographic research on, through and about digital media.