Whose Voice Counts? Mapping Stakeholder Perspectives on AI Through Public Submissions to the U.S. Government
Authors: Alina Karakanta, Alex Christiansen, Tomás Dodds, Bissie Anderson, Matteo Fuoli, Marcus Perlman, Aletta G. Dorst
Organizations: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden University · Department of Linguistics and Communication, University of Birmingham · School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more common in our daily lives, it is important to understand how different stakeholders comprehend and envisage the role that these technologies play in shaping social, political, and economic realities. In this paper, we investigate public perceptions of AI based on a corpus of letters submitted during the public consultation for the Trump Administration's US AI Action Plan. To this aim, we release a corpus cleaning pipeline and perform topic modelling and frequency analysis to explore predominant topics discussed by different subgroups (e.g., academia, individuals, private sector) and those appearing in the AI Action Plan. Our results show that individuals voice strong concerns related to the impact of AI on life, while other stakeholders are more concerned with AI development. Our comparison of topics suggests that the AI Action Plan reflects predominantly the concerns of the private sector on security, policies, and development, with individuals' concerns less represented.