"Come to us first": Centering Community Organizations in Artificial Intelligence for Social Good Partnerships

DOI

Artificial Intelligence for Social Good (AI4SG) has emerged as a growing body of scholarship and applied programs exploring AI technologies' potential to tackle social issues, emphasizing interdisciplinary partnerships with community organizations, such as non-profits and international organizations. What are the needs, expectations, and aspirations of community organizations, and are they being met? Pursuing these questions is important to ensure that the considerable efforts by the AI teams and the community organizations actually achieve the impacts they strive for. Anchoring on the Data Feminism framework, we addressed these questions with 16 semi-structured interviews with members of social sector organizations on AI4SG projects. Our study reveals a pervasive influence of funders' agendas and AI hype on collaborations. Despite the significant intellectual contributions from community organization members, their goals were frequently sidelined in favor of other stakeholders' priorities. While many expected a tangible product or deployment from the partnerships, only two out of 14 projects we studied reached the deployment stage. However, community organization members sustained their recognition of the technology teams' expertise and belief in the potential of the projects, still seeing diminished goals as valuable. To enhance the efficacy of future collaborations, our participants shared their aspirations for success, demanding co-leadership from the early stages of and throughout the projects. We propose to use data co-liberation as a grounding principle for AI4SG moving forward, arguing that community organizations’ co-leadership is essential for fostering more effective, sustainable, and ethical development of technology in socially driven collaborations.