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As public debate about AI develops, voices of platform workers, many of whom are migrant and marginalised workers, remain muted. Our project positions platform workers as experts who see the flaws and biases of AI-driven and algorithmically-managed systems.

Building on relationships with Edinburgh’s Spanish-speaking and South Asian communities, we will enable workers to: discuss and pool tacit knowledge of AI; develop methods and skills to interpret data-driven decision-making and its effects; produce public engagement materials including a video, pamphlet, and report. These campaign materials, developed in conversation with partners and AI decision-makers, will prove how worker-driven research hubs can build workers’ agency and skills to shape AI-use across the UK.

The project engages platform workers in a paid ‘worker data science’ project that relates their work experiences to the effects of AI-driven technologies. Worker data science fuses three methods: ‘radical citizen science’ by which public or private individuals co-create research projects; ‘data science’ which concerns the analysis of data to extract meaningful insights; and ‘worker inquiry’ which is purposeful worker-led investigation of work (Gallagher et al 2023). This worker-driven project will be delivered by the Project Officer (PO), Project Manager (PM), and Outreach Worker (OW), supported by expert and academic team members, in four phases.

The use of AI in immigration decision-making, particularly in the asylum system, raises concerns about discrimination and negative impact on migrants, including refugees. Politicians are implementing AI without transparency or scrutiny, neglecting the human cost. Our goal is to understand AI's impact through workshops and engagement with people seeking asylum, enabling them to drive systems change.

Our goal is to understand AI's impact through workshops and engagement with people seeking asylum, enabling them to drive systems change. 

We will: Educate people seeking asylum about AI through creative activities and gather evidence of its impact on their daily lives; Enable people seeking asylum to identify and challenge AI misuse in their cases through deliberative dialogue sessions and interviews; Use this evidence to co-produce resources educating others about AI use in asylum systems and processes, including decision-makers and tech/data campaigners

This proposal builds upon an existing collaboration between UNJUST CIC, The 4Front Project, and Tottenham Rights (‘Erase the Database’). Established in 2022, this project foregrounds racially marginalised groups and communities to surface the harms of data-driven and automated policing, informing community-led strategies and solutions.

Community-led consultations and conversations: Our research discussions and conversations will be led by the communities and groups we are working with. This approach is essential to ensure that the ‘reimagining’ of justice that we are proposing comes directly from within the communities and groups impacted, and that they themselves have complete agency on this.

We will conduct an initial mapping exercise of relevant databases and data-based systems used by police and other law enforcement and criminal justice authorities in relation to racist ‘gangs’ policing, surveillance and profiling. 

There will be interviews, workshops and discussion groups with young people and communities impacted by these AI, automated and data-based systems, as well as frontline practitioners and relevant local officials, such as local councillors.

A key framing of our community engagement will be around what justice could look like outside of the criminal legal system. 

Because this project will be co-created with those at the sharpest end of police tech harms, the way in which our findings are shared will be decided in collaboration with participants. A key aim is to galvanise public support and mobilise change in the systems that are disproportionately harmful to racialised communities. We will facilitate space for creative thinking about how the findings can be shared in a way that reaches beyond academia and in a way that speaks to young people directly affected by police tech. Ultimately, this will be decided with young people, communities and within the framework of the project itself.

‘Reclaim the Algorithm’ extends The People Speak’s ongoing work with two distinctly disadvantaged communities in East London to confront urgent issues surround the widespread deployment of AI. The project iteratively develops the successful Talkaoke discursive format in a new collaboration with artists Luksch & Patel, and with the participants.

Our project uses fun, tested participatory processes to explore how AI affects access to information and services (specifically, health/social care/criminal justice) – and to perhaps reimagine it, through the collaborative creation of a short film. Together, we identify and articulate individual participants’ concerns, while the film becomes an advocacy tool with broader application.

Through the offering of inviting, playful, multiple engagement formats and media tools (including drawing, short games and audiovisual effects units), we will invite participants to co-design an evolving, expressive space where they can articulate concerns and desires, and perhaps envision alternatives, producing an output in a medium of their choice. We may even come up with a preliminary set of protocols to check the provenance of information, for example. The output of each group will be filmed.