Supporting User Engagement in Testing, Auditing, and Contesting AI

In recent years, interest in directly involving end users in testing, auditing, and contesting AI systems has grown. The involvement of end users, especially from diverse backgrounds, can be essential to overcome AI developers’ blind spots and to surface issues that would otherwise go undetected prior to causing real-world harm. Emerging bodies of work in CSCW have begun to explore ways to engage end-users in testing and auditing AI systems, and to empower users to contest problematic or erroneous AI outputs. As this is a nascent area of work, we still know little about how to support effective user engagement. In this one-day workshop, we will bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and non-profit organizations to share ongoing efforts related to this workshop’s theme. Central to our discussions will be the challenges encountered in developing tools and processes to support user involvement, strategies to incentivize involvement, the asymmetric power dynamic between AI developers and end users, and the role of regulation in enhancing the accountability of AI developers and ameliorating potential burdens towards end-users. Overall, we hope the workshop will help shape the future of user engagement in building more responsible AI.