Retethering AI to contestable human values

Abstract (English)

In January 2023, 12,000 Google employees woke up to find that their work phones wouldn’t turn on, they were locked out of their laptops, and their office access cards no longer worked. Many of those who lost their jobs were storytellers, creatives, diversity and inclusion experts. They were the folks who had been keeping Google’s increasingly automated and algorithmic advertising business tethered to the human imagination and to contested human values. In the aftermath, the layoffs were framed as the inevitable next step in an industry moving quickly towards an AI-dominated future. They were framed as essential to Google’s profitability and viability, as proof of efficiency and excellence.
This paper examines the responses of some individuals who were laid off. It looks at two AI-based businesses launched by ex-Google employees who refuse to see their careful, human-led interventions as unnecessary. One helps advertisers improve the effectiveness of their creative output. The other uses so-called Responsible AI to enhance diversity and inclusion across a brand’s advertising and product lines. The paper examines how those helming these businesses make sense of human-machine relations in the cut-throat New York advertising scene.
This paper disrupts the tendency to reify algorithms and AI, or to see them as ‘black boxes’. It frames them as assemblages rather than as 'its' to be studied. It follows Seaver’s (2018) assertion that we can imagine algorithms like woven fabrics, tacked onto social life. They are dynamic assemablages that are continually rewoven in response to human direction. Building on this, I conceptualise human-machine relations as a continual process of retethering unruly algorithms to dynamic human values. Where anthropological focus has been on the shadow workforces that underpin seemingly automated technologies, this paper foregrounds the work of those who insist on the human nature of algorithmic work. It explores the processes of valuation and contextualisation that they use to make sense of and resist the sidelining of their work.