David Gray Widder
Cornell Tech
AI Supply Chains: Tools to Locate Power and Responsibility in AI Production for Critical, Accountable Computing
Abstract
Contemporary AI production is structured to enable ignorance of harm for those who want it, and complicate resistance for those who don’t. Through case studies of the fractured AI supply chains in a variety of contexts—open source deepfake tools, NASA’s AI autocoder, and AI engineers' own ethical concerns—this talk will examine how a lack of relationality between distributed sites of AI production fractures knowledge, responsibility, and power, leading to unaccountable harm.
We will then discuss steps to intervene in AI supply chains toward an agenda for critical, accountable computing. I begin by examining interventions to enable epistemic pluralism in AI production, in particular knowledge from personal experiences of harm. I then discuss the political economy of AI: which corporate and military actors have access to AI’s requisite resources, and how we can hold them accountable for their claims and harms. Finally, I will discuss technical ways to reassemble AI supply chains, to normalize engineers knowing and caring about how their work is used, and to enable advocates and policymakers to understand infrastructural dependencies of harm.
About
David Gray Widder (he/him) studies how people creating “Artificial Intelligence” systems think about the downstream harms their systems make possible, and the wider cultural, political, and economic logics which shape these thoughts. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, and earned his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has previously conducted research at Intel Labs, Microsoft Research, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His recent research has been accepted to FAccT, Nature, CSCW, and Big Data & Society. His scholarly and activist work has appeared in Motherboard, MIT Technology Review, Wired, the Associated Press, and the New York Times. David was born in Tillamook, Oregon, and raised in Berlin and Singapore. He maintains a conceptual-realist artistic practice, advocates against police terror and pervasive surveillance, and enjoys distance running. You can engage with him on Mastodon, Bluesky, or Twitter.