About the Global AI Narratives Project
Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to have an unprecedented global impact, and public perceptions of AI will influence much of how the technology is developed, adopted and regulated. To better understand the likely impacts of AI technologies around the world, the Global AI Narratives (GAIN) project investigates how people from different cultures and regions view the risks and benefits of AI, and, more specifically, how AI narratives are helping to shape these views.
WHO ARE WE?
GAIN is an interdisciplinary academic research project within the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge. The core GAIN team works with a network of Global Partners and funders to run events and organise research collaborations around the world.
THE GOALS OF THE GAIN PROJECT
Many worldviews on AI are currently poorly understood. Public perceptions of AI beyond the Western perspective ( a viewpoint primarily fueled by cinematic narratives like The Terminator and I, Robot) receive very little attention from academics and policy makers. We aim to address this lack of representation through research on the production and dissemination of AI narratives in communities around the world.
The goals of GAIN are therefore:
To understand how different cultures and regions perceive the risks and benefits of AI, and the influences that are shaping those perceptions.
To create a global community of experts who can relate these diverse visions to pressing questions of AI ethics and governance.
To foster interdisciplinary academic research from underrepresented regions and groups through collaborative projects and publications.
Project outputs
GAIN is a four-year project running from 2018 to 2022. The project aims to understand and analyse how different cultures and regions perceive the risks and benefits of AI, and the influences that are shaping those perceptions. The project has been highly successful so far, having held four workshops in-person in Singapore, Japan, Russia and Egypt. However, since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, in-person workshops have had to be postponed. With such uncertainty around the possibility of in-person events in the future, the project has switched to an online format for its workshops to ensure that GAIN can continues to engage with diverse voices globally on the subject of AI narratives.
In addition to the four completed in-person workshops, another sixteen virtual workshops will be undertaken across five continents. Each workshop takes place in a different region outside the UK and North America. At each of these workshops we ask local experts to present their experience of AI - whether that is an academic presenting their research, an industry expert discussing their current work, an artist or writer presenting their creative work, or an activist talking about the remit or purpose of their civil action. Outputs from each workshop are tailored to the preferences and specialisms of the relevant regional partner and the findings during the workshop. Consequently, each workshop’s outputs will include one or more of the following: academic publications; general-audience reports; peer-reviewed reports. We also write up each workshop as a blog.
In addition, we will conduct a global survey on the influence of AI narratives on public perceptions of AI in different cultures. The project team has gained ethics approval to conduct a global survey on public perceptions of AI across cultures. This survey will build on our previous work in collaboration with the BBC exploring how public hopes and fears for an AI-enabled future in the UK are influenced by narratives. The survey will have an extensive global reach, covering the most populous countries and the most widely spoken languages. We will use the findings to help guide the discussion in our virtual workshops to make for more focused and productive proceedings, and the results will be published as an academic paper.
The project will also result in the publication of an edited collection of academic papers compiled from a selection of contributors to our virtual workshops. This will be a companion volume to the recently published AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines (Oxford University Press, 2020).