The problem with trust: on the discursive commodification of trust in AI

This commentary draws critical attention to the ongoing commodification of trust in policy and scholarly discourses of artificial intelligence (AI) and society. Based on an assessment of publications discussing the implementation of AI in governmental and private services, our findings indicate that...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAI & society Vol. 38; no. 4; pp. 1753 - 1761
Main Authors Krüger, Steffen, Wilson, Christopher
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Springer London 01.08.2023
Springer
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Artificial Intelligence
Civil society
Commodification
Computer Science
Control
Discourse analysis
Engineering Economics
Logistics
Marketing
Mechatronics
Methodology of the Social Sciences
Open Forum
Organization
Performing Arts
Raw materials
Robotics
Trust
AI ethics
Discourse analysis
Artificial intelligence
Trust
Commodification
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Summary:This commentary draws critical attention to the ongoing commodification of trust in policy and scholarly discourses of artificial intelligence (AI) and society. Based on an assessment of publications discussing the implementation of AI in governmental and private services, our findings indicate that this discursive trend towards commodification is driven by the need for a trusting population of service users to harvest data at scale and leads to the discursive construction of trust as an essential good on a par with data as raw material. This discursive commodification is marked by a decreasing emphasis on trust understood as the expected reliability of a trusted agent, and increased emphasis on instrumental and extractive framings of trust as a resource. This tendency, we argue, does an ultimate disservice to developers, users, and systems alike, insofar as it obscures the subtle mechanisms through which trust in AI systems might be built, making it less likely that it will be.
ISSN:0951-5666
1435-5655
DOI:10.1007/s00146-022-01401-6