Towards trustworthy AI: raising awareness in marginalized communities

Citizen trust is a central part of an ethical AI ecosystem, and a key part of upcoming AI legislation across the world. However, pockets of society have little awareness of what is meant by AI or its current use by organizations. Therefore, a first step towards building citizen trust is to raise general awareness of what is meant by AI technologies, how data is captured and used in decision making, and existing citizens’ rights to question organizations about the use of their data in automated decision making. This paper describes a mechanism to reach different groups of publics through a Community AI Roadshow. The motivation was to develop a way to reach and engage with traditionally marginalized communities and develop a common language and understanding around AI. An evaluation showed that understanding of AI increased by 33% following the roadshow. A resulting set of recommendations for AI researchers engaging with marginalized communities is given. The methodology presented in this paper has since been adapted for other groups of publics, such as local governmental organizations in the UK.