arXiv subjects

Kimon Kieslich

Publications and source records attributed to Kimon Kieslich.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Why AI Slop Matters, but Not Like That

This is a response to the paper ''Why Slop Matters''. By offering both immanent and external critique, we argue that the authors' reasoning neglects the socio-technical context of AI slop. Our paper presents an ethical and social science informed response that centers the debate on the social function and aesthetic value of AI slop. We conclude that AI slop is an important research subject but call for a contextual and culturally-grounded debate on the issue. To that end, we discuss some key elements of an agenda for future research on the phenomenon of AI slop.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Informing AI Policy Assessment using Large-Scale Simulation of Interventions

As the rapid proliferation of AI systems and harms spurs efforts in AI governance around the world, prioritizing among competing policy options has become increasingly challenging for policymakers and researchers. We introduce a methodology for identifying viable policy options to mitigate specified AI harms, helping policymakers and researchers target areas that warrant greater time and resource investment. This method combines participatory evaluation of policies, expert assessment of implementation costs, and an LLM-based assessment of perceived harm mitigation under each policy option. We leverage a genetic algorithm-based simulation study to explore a vast solution space of potential policy combinations, and examine how outcomes change under different weightings of cost, participatory input, and harm mitigation. We find that this method enables exploration of different balances between participatory and expert components, allowing policymakers and researchers to assess how much weight to assign to each. We argue that the diversity of viable policy combinations found by the genetic algorithm could be a useful starting point for deliberation. This method operationalizes existing work on participatory AI by integrating it directly into practical policy development pipelines.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

"Make It Sound Like a Lawyer Wrote It": Scenarios of Potential Impacts of Generative AI for Legal Conflict Resolution

Generative AI (GenAI) tools are transforming critical societal domains, including the legal sector. While these tools create opportunities such as increased efficiency and potential improvements in access to justice, they also present new challenges, such as the risk of inaccurate legal advice and questions about the legitimacy of legal decisions. However, the full impact remains to be seen and ultimately depends on the way GenAI tools are implemented and used by both, legal professionals and citizens. This makes anticipating and managing the positive and negative impacts of GenAI use in the legal domain challenging but also important to guide the digital transformation of the legal sector into a societally desirable direction. In this paper, we set out to explore the spectrum of possible impacts of GenAI in the legal domain, examining how this technology is anticipated being used and the potential implications this might have for the legal sector and society. Using a scenario writing method, we surveyed participants in the EU and US including both citizens and legal professionals about the potential impact of generative AI on legal conflict resolution. Respondents were tasked with writing a narrative drawing on their experience or expertise about a future in which AI is used throughout the legal process. We qualitatively analysed the prevalence of risk and benefit themes, as well as the types of anticipated legal tasks. We then compared these findings based on expertise status (legal experts versus citizens) and regional regulatory background (the EU with the EU AI Act versus the US with an industry self-regulatory approach). Finally, we describe the emerging trade-offs that will affect decision-makers in the legal sector.

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arXiv2026

Trade-Offs in Deploying Legal AI: Insights from a Public Opinion Study to Guide AI Risk Management

Generative AI tools are increasingly used for legal tasks, including legal research, drafting documents, and even for legal decision-making. As for other purposes, the use of GenAI in the legal domain comes with various risks and benefits that needs to be properly managed to ensure implementation in a way that serves public values and protect human rights. While the EU mandates risk assessment and audits before market introduction for some use cases (e.g., use by judges for administration of justice) other use cases do not fall under the AI Acts' high-risk classifications (e.g., use by citizens for legal consultation or drafting documents). Further, current risk management practices prioritize expert judgment on risk factor identification and prioritization without a corresponding legal requirement to consult with affected communities. Seeing the societal importance of the legal sector and the potentially transformative impact of GenAI in this sector, the acceptability and legitimacy of GenAI solutions also depends on public perceptions and a better understanding of the risks and benefits citizens associated with the use of AI in the legal sector. As a response, this papers presents data from a representative sample of German citizens (n=488) outlining citizens' perspectives on the use of GenAI for two legal tasks: legal consultation and legal mediation. Concretely, we i) systematically map risks and benefit factors for both legal tasks, ii) describe predictors that influence risk acceptance of the use of GenAI for those tasks, and iii) highlight emerging trade-off themes that citizens engage in when weighing up risk acceptability. Our results provides an empirical overview of citizens' concerns regarding risk management of GenAI for the legal domain, foregrounding critical themes that complement current risk assessment procedures.

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arXiv2025

Informing AI Risk Assessment with News Media: Analyzing National and Political Variation in the Coverage of AI Risks

Risk-based approaches to AI governance often center the technological artifact as the primary focus of risk assessments, overlooking systemic risks that emerge from the complex interaction between AI systems and society. One potential source to incorporate more societal context into these approaches is the news media, as it embeds and reflects complex interactions between AI systems, human stakeholders, and the larger society. News media is influential in terms of which AI risks are emphasized and discussed in the public sphere, and thus which risks are deemed important. Yet, variations in the news media between countries and across different value systems (e.g. political orientations) may differentially shape the prioritization of risks through the media's agenda setting and framing processes. To better understand these variations, this work presents a comparative analysis of a cross-national sample of news media spanning 6 countries (the U.S., the U.K., India, Australia, Israel, and South Africa). Our findings show that AI risks are prioritized differently across nations and shed light on how left vs. right leaning U.S. based outlets not only differ in the prioritization of AI risks in their coverage, but also use politicized language in the reporting of these risks. These findings can inform risk assessors and policy-makers about the nuances they should account for when considering news media as a supplementary source for risk-based governance approaches.

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arXiv2025

Scenarios in Computing Research: A Systematic Review of the Use of Scenario Methods for Exploring the Future of Computing Technologies in Society

Scenario building is an established method to anticipate the future of emerging technologies. Its primary goal is to use narratives to map future trajectories of technology development and sociotechnical adoption. Following this process, risks and benefits can be identified early on, and strategies can be developed that strive for desirable futures. In recent years, computer science has adopted this method and applied it to various technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI). Because computing technologies play such an important role in shaping modern societies, it is worth exploring how scenarios are being used as an anticipatory tool in the field -- and what possible traditional uses of scenarios are not yet covered but have the potential to enrich the field. We address this gap by conducting a systematic literature review on the use of scenario building methods in computer science over the last decade (n = 59). We guide the review along two main questions. First, we aim to uncover how scenarios are used in computing literature, focusing especially on the rationale for why scenarios are used. Second, in following the potential of scenario building to enhance inclusivity in research, we dive deeper into the participatory element of the existing scenario building literature in computer science.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Global Perspectives of AI Risks and Harms: Analyzing the Negative Impacts of AI Technologies as Prioritized by News Media

Emerging AI technologies have the potential to drive economic growth and innovation but can also pose significant risks to society. To mitigate these risks, governments, companies, and researchers have contributed regulatory frameworks, risk assessment approaches, and safety benchmarks, but these can lack nuance when considered in global deployment contexts. One way to understand these nuances is by looking at how the media reports on AI, as news media has a substantial influence on what negative impacts of AI are discussed in the public sphere and which impacts are deemed important. In this work, we analyze a broad and diverse sample of global news media spanning 27 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, Middle East, North America, and Oceania to gain valuable insights into the risks and harms of AI technologies as reported and prioritized across media outlets in different countries. This approach reveals a skewed prioritization of Societal Risks followed by Legal & Rights-related Risks, Content Safety Risks, Cognitive Risks, Existential Risks, and Environmental Risks, as reflected in the prevalence of these risk categories in the news coverage of different nations. Furthermore, it highlights how the distribution of such concerns varies based on the political bias of news outlets, underscoring the political nature of AI risk assessment processes and public opinion. By incorporating views from various regions and political orientations for assessing the risks and harms of AI, this work presents stakeholders, such as AI developers and policy makers, with insights into the AI risks categories prioritized in the public sphere. These insights may guide the development of more inclusive, safe, and responsible AI technologies that address the diverse concerns and needs across the world.

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arXiv2025

Envisioning Stakeholder-Action Pairs to Mitigate Negative Impacts of AI: A Participatory Approach to Inform Policy Making

The potential for negative impacts of AI has rapidly become more pervasive around the world, and this has intensified a need for responsible AI governance. While many regulatory bodies endorse risk-based approaches and a multitude of risk mitigation practices are proposed by companies and academic scholars, these approaches are commonly expert-centered and thus lack the inclusion of a significant group of stakeholders. Ensuring that AI policies align with democratic expectations requires methods that prioritize the voices and needs of those impacted. In this work we develop a participative and forward-looking approach to inform policy-makers and academics that grounds the needs of lay stakeholders at the forefront and enriches the development of risk mitigation strategies. Our approach (1) maps potential mitigation and prevention strategies of negative AI impacts that assign responsibility to various stakeholders, (2) explores the importance and prioritization thereof in the eyes of laypeople, and (3) presents these insights in policy fact sheets, i.e., a digestible format for informing policy processes. We emphasize that this approach is not targeted towards replacing policy-makers; rather our aim is to present an informative method that enriches mitigation strategies and enables a more participatory approach to policy development.

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arXiv2024

Towards Leveraging News Media to Support Impact Assessment of AI Technologies

Expert-driven frameworks for impact assessments (IAs) may inadvertently overlook the effects of AI technologies on the public's social behavior, policy, and the cultural and geographical contexts shaping the perception of AI and the impacts around its use. This research explores the potentials of fine-tuning LLMs on negative impacts of AI reported in a diverse sample of articles from 266 news domains spanning 30 countries around the world to incorporate more diversity into IAs. Our findings highlight (1) the potential of fine-tuned open-source LLMs in supporting IA of AI technologies by generating high-quality negative impacts across four qualitative dimensions: coherence, structure, relevance, and plausibility, and (2) the efficacy of small open-source LLM (Mistral-7B) fine-tuned on impacts from news media in capturing a wider range of categories of impacts that GPT-4 had gaps in covering.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Using Scenario-Writing for Identifying and Mitigating Impacts of Generative AI

Impact assessments have emerged as a common way to identify the negative and positive implications of AI deployment, with the goal of avoiding the downsides of its use. It is undeniable that impact assessments are important - especially in the case of rapidly proliferating technologies such as generative AI. But it is also essential to critically interrogate the current literature and practice on impact assessment, to identify its shortcomings, and to develop new approaches that are responsive to these limitations. In this provocation, we do just that by first critiquing the current impact assessment literature and then proposing a novel approach that addresses our concerns: Scenario-Based Sociotechnical Envisioning.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Simulating Policy Impacts: Developing a Generative Scenario Writing Method to Evaluate the Perceived Effects of Regulation

The rapid advancement of AI technologies yields numerous future impacts on individuals and society. Policymakers are tasked to react quickly and establish policies that mitigate those impacts. However, anticipating the effectiveness of policies is a difficult task, as some impacts might only be observable in the future and respective policies might not be applicable to the future development of AI. In this work we develop a method for using large language models (LLMs) to evaluate the efficacy of a given piece of policy at mitigating specified negative impacts. We do so by using GPT-4 to generate scenarios both pre- and post-introduction of policy and translating these vivid stories into metrics based on human perceptions of impacts. We leverage an already established taxonomy of impacts of generative AI in the media environment to generate a set of scenario pairs both mitigated and non-mitigated by the transparency policy in Article 50 of the EU AI Act. We then run a user study (n=234) to evaluate these scenarios across four risk-assessment dimensions: severity, plausibility, magnitude, and specificity to vulnerable populations. We find that this transparency legislation is perceived to be effective at mitigating harms in areas such as labor and well-being, but largely ineffective in areas such as social cohesion and security. Through this case study we demonstrate the efficacy of our method as a tool to iterate on the effectiveness of policy for mitigating various negative impacts. We expect this method to be useful to researchers or other stakeholders who want to brainstorm the potential utility of different pieces of policy or other mitigation strategies.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Regulating AI-Based Remote Biometric Identification. Investigating the Public Demand for Bans, Audits, and Public Database Registrations

AI is increasingly being used in the public sector, including public security. In this context, the use of AI-powered remote biometric identification (RBI) systems is a much-discussed technology. RBI systems are used to identify criminal activity in public spaces, but are criticised for inheriting biases and violating fundamental human rights. It is therefore important to ensure that such systems are developed in the public interest, which means that any technology that is deployed for public use needs to be scrutinised. While there is a consensus among business leaders, policymakers and scientists that AI must be developed in an ethical and trustworthy manner, scholars have argued that ethical guidelines do not guarantee ethical AI, but rather prevent stronger regulation of AI. As a possible counterweight, public opinion can have a decisive influence on policymakers to establish boundaries and conditions under which AI systems should be used -- if at all. However, we know little about the conditions that lead to regulatory demand for AI systems. In this study, we focus on the role of trust in AI as well as trust in law enforcement as potential factors that may lead to demands for regulation of AI technology. In addition, we explore the mediating effects of discrimination perceptions regarding RBI. We test the effects on four different use cases of RBI varying the temporal aspect (real-time vs. post hoc analysis) and purpose of use (persecution of criminals vs. safeguarding public events) in a survey among German citizens. We found that German citizens do not differentiate between the different modes of application in terms of their demand for RBI regulation. Furthermore, we show that perceptions of discrimination lead to a demand for stronger regulation, while trust in AI and trust in law enforcement lead to opposite effects in terms of demand for a ban on RBI systems.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

My Future with My Chatbot: A Scenario-Driven, User-Centric Approach to Anticipating AI Impacts

As a general purpose technology without a concrete pre-defined purpose, personal chatbots can be used for a whole range of objectives, depending on the personal needs, contexts, and tasks of an individual, and so potentially impact a variety of values, people, and social contexts. Traditional methods of risk assessment are confronted with several challenges: the lack of a clearly defined technology purpose, the lack of clearly defined values to orient on, the heterogeneity of uses, and the difficulty of actively engaging citizens themselves in anticipating impacts from the perspective of their individual lived realities. In this article, we leverage scenario writing at scale as a method for anticipating AI impact that is responsive to these challenges. The advantages of the scenario method are its ability to engage individual users and stimulate them to consider how chatbots are likely to affect their reality and so collect different impact scenarios depending on the cultural and societal embedding of a heterogeneous citizenship. Empirically, we tasked 106 US-based participants to write short fictional stories about the future impact (whether desirable or undesirable) of AI-based personal chatbots on individuals and society and, in addition, ask respondents to explain why these impacts are important and how they relate to their values. In the analysis process, we map those impacts and analyze them in relation to socio-demographic as well as AI-related attitudes of the scenario writers. We show that our method is effective in (1) identifying and mapping desirable and undesirable impacts of AI-based personal chatbots, (2) setting these impacts in relation to values that are important for individuals, and (3) detecting socio-demographic and AI-attitude related differences of impact anticipation.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Anticipating Impacts: Using Large-Scale Scenario Writing to Explore Diverse Implications of Generative AI in the News Environment

The tremendous rise of generative AI has reached every part of society - including the news environment. There are many concerns about the individual and societal impact of the increasing use of generative AI, including issues such as disinformation and misinformation, discrimination, and the promotion of social tensions. However, research on anticipating the impact of generative AI is still in its infancy and mostly limited to the views of technology developers and/or researchers. In this paper, we aim to broaden the perspective and capture the expectations of three stakeholder groups (news consumers; technology developers; content creators) about the potential negative impacts of generative AI, as well as mitigation strategies to address these. Methodologically, we apply scenario writing and use participatory foresight in the context of a survey (n=119) to delve into cognitively diverse imaginations of the future. We qualitatively analyze the scenarios using thematic analysis to systematically map potential impacts of generative AI on the news environment, potential mitigation strategies, and the role of stakeholders in causing and mitigating these impacts. In addition, we measure respondents' opinions on a specific mitigation strategy, namely transparency obligations as suggested in Article 52 of the draft EU AI Act. We compare the results across different stakeholder groups and elaborate on the (non-) presence of different expected impacts across these groups. We conclude by discussing the usefulness of scenario-writing and participatory foresight as a toolbox for generative AI impact assessment.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Ever heard of ethical AI? Investigating the salience of ethical AI issues among the German population

Building and implementing ethical AI systems that benefit the whole society is cost-intensive and a multi-faceted task fraught with potential problems. While computer science focuses mostly on the technical questions to mitigate social issues, social science addresses citizens' perceptions to elucidate social and political demands that influence the societal implementation of AI systems. Thus, in this study, we explore the salience of AI issues in the public with an emphasis on ethical criteria to investigate whether it is likely that ethical AI is actively requested by the population. Between May 2020 and April 2021, we conducted 15 surveys asking the German population about the most important AI-related issues (total of N=14,988 respondents). Our results show that the majority of respondents were not concerned with AI at all. However, it can be seen that general interest in AI and a higher educational level are predictive of some engagement with AI. Among those, who reported having thought about AI, specific applications (e.g., autonomous driving) were by far the most mentioned topics. Ethical issues are voiced only by a small subset of citizens with fairness, accountability, and transparency being the least mentioned ones. These have been identified in several ethical guidelines (including the EU Commission's proposal) as key elements for the development of ethical AI. The salience of ethical issues affects the behavioral intentions of citizens in the way that they 1) tend to avoid AI technology and 2) engage in public discussions about AI. We conclude that the low level of ethical implications may pose a serious problem for the actual implementation of ethical AI for the Common Good and emphasize that those who are presumably most affected by ethical issues of AI are especially unaware of ethical risks. Yet, once ethical AI is top of the mind, there is some potential for activism.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

Using automated decision-making (ADM) to allocate Covid-19 vaccinations? Exploring the roles of trust and social group preference on the legitimacy of ADM vs. human decision-making

In combating the ongoing global health threat of the Covid-19 pandemic, decision-makers have to take actions based on a multitude of relevant health data with severe potential consequences for the affected patients. Because of their presumed advantages in handling and analyzing vast amounts of data, computer systems of automated decision-making (ADM) are implemented and substitute humans in decision-making processes. In this study, we focus on a specific application of ADM in contrast to human decision-making (HDM), namely the allocation of Covid-19 vaccines to the public. In particular, we elaborate on the role of trust and social group preference on the legitimacy of vaccine allocation. We conducted a survey with a 2x2 randomized factorial design among n=1602 German respondents, in which we utilized distinct decision-making agents (HDM vs. ADM) and prioritization of a specific social group (teachers vs. prisoners) as design factors. Our findings show that general trust in ADM systems and preference for vaccination of a specific social group influence the legitimacy of vaccine allocation. However, contrary to our expectations, trust in the agent making the decision did not moderate the link between social group preference and legitimacy. Moreover, the effect was also not moderated by the type of decision-maker (human vs. algorithm). We conclude that trustworthy ADM systems must not necessarily lead to the legitimacy of ADM systems.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

AI-Ethics by Design. Evaluating Public Perception on the Importance of Ethical Design Principles of AI

Despite the immense societal importance of ethically designing artificial intelligence (AI), little research on the public perceptions of ethical AI principles exists. This becomes even more striking when considering that ethical AI development has the aim to be human-centric and of benefit for the whole society. In this study, we investigate how ethical principles (explainability, fairness, security, accountability, accuracy, privacy, machine autonomy) are weighted in comparison to each other. This is especially important, since simultaneously considering ethical principles is not only costly, but sometimes even impossible, as developers must make specific trade-off decisions. In this paper, we give first answers on the relative importance of ethical principles given a specific use case - the use of AI in tax fraud detection. The results of a large conjoint survey (n=1099) suggest that, by and large, German respondents found the ethical principles equally important. However, subsequent cluster analysis shows that different preference models for ethically designed systems exist among the German population. These clusters substantially differ not only in the preferred attributes, but also in the importance level of the attributes themselves. We further describe how these groups are constituted in terms of sociodemographics as well as opinions on AI. Societal implications as well as design challenges are discussed.

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arXiv2020

The Threats of Artificial Intelligence Scale (TAI). Development, Measurement and Test Over Three Application Domains

In recent years Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained much popularity, with the scientific community as well as with the public. AI is often ascribed many positive impacts for different social domains such as medicine and the economy. On the other side, there is also growing concern about its precarious impact on society and individuals. Several opinion polls frequently query the public fear of autonomous robots and artificial intelligence (FARAI), a phenomenon coming also into scholarly focus. As potential threat perceptions arguably vary with regard to the reach and consequences of AI functionalities and the domain of application, research still lacks necessary precision of a respective measurement that allows for wide-spread research applicability. We propose a fine-grained scale to measure threat perceptions of AI that accounts for four functional classes of AI systems and is applicable to various domains of AI applications. Using a standardized questionnaire in a survey study (N=891), we evaluate the scale over three distinct AI domains (loan origination, job recruitment and medical treatment). The data support the dimensional structure of the proposed Threats of AI (TAI) scale as well as the internal consistency and factoral validity of the indicators. Implications of the results and the empirical application of the scale are discussed in detail. Recommendations for further empirical use of the TAI scale are provided.

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