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Problematizing “Empowerment” in HCAI
Book chapter   Peer reviewed

Problematizing “Empowerment” in HCAI

John S. Seberger, Hyesun Choung and Prabu David
Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2023, pp 270-279
01 Jan 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42286-7_15
url
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42286-7_15View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

discourse Empowerment HCAI HCI language
Human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI) seeks to assuage fears about ubiquitous machine agency by framing AI in relation to observable human benefits. Such benefits limn a nebulous future condition of AI-driven “empowerment.” Yet the rhetorics of HCAI generally preempt consideration of the power structures that subtend imaginaries of AI ubiquity: imaginaries wherein empowerment is bestowed, top-down, through an assumed prior forfeiture of users’ bottom-up agency to choose or refuse enrolment in AI futures. Answering calls to examine the language of AI research, we focus on “empowerment” and its use in, and relationship to, three visions of HCAI published between 2019 and 2022. We use close reading to begin answering one research question: “What is the conceptual structure of ‘empowerment’ across complementary visions of HCAI?” We contend that empowerment in HCAI represents little more than paternalistic conditional empowerment. Our work demonstrates the value of language-centric analysis in AI and presents a plea to explicitly account for the discourses – their histories, grammars, power distributions – that are used to rationalize the looming ubiquity of AI.

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