Original Research Article

Big Data & Society

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AI as super-controversy: Eliciting AI and © The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/20539517241255103
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Noortje Marres1 , Michael Castelle1 , Beatrice Gobbo2 ,

Chiara Poletti1 and James Tripp1

Abstract
Following the release of large language models in the late 2010s, the backers of this new type of artificial intelligence (AI)
publicly affirmed that the technology is controversial and harmful to society. This situation sets contemporary AI apart
from 20th-century controversies about technnoscience, such as nuclear power and genetically modified (GM) foods, and
disrupts established assumptions concerning public controversies as occasions for technological democracy. In particular,
it challenges the idea that such controversies enable inclusion and collective processes of problem definition (‘problem-
atisation’) across societal domains. In this paper, we show how social research can contribute to addressing this challenge
of AI controversies by adopting a distinctive methodology of controversy analysis: controversy elicitation. This approach
actively selects, qualifies and evaluates controversies in terms of their capacity to problematise AI across the science and
non-science binary. We describe our implementation of this approach in a participatory study of recent AI controversies,
conducted through consultation with UK experts in AI and society. Combining an online questionnaire, social media ana-
lysis and a participatory workshop, our study suggests that civil society actors have developed distinctive strategies of
problematisation that counter the strategic affirmation of AI’s controversiality by its proponents and which centre on
the public mobilisation of AI-related incidents: demonstrations of bias, accidents and walkouts. Crucially, this emphasis
on ‘AI frictions’ does not result in the fragmentation of AI controversies, but rather enables the articulation of AI as a
‘super-controversy’: the explication of connections between technical propositions, situated troubles and structural pro-
blems in society (discrimination, inequalities and corporate power).

Keywords
Artificial intelligence, controversy analysis, elicitation methods, science and technology studies, Twitter, design for debate

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Introduction
In March 2023, the San Francisco-based start-up OpenAI 1
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick,
released their latest large language model (LLM) Coventry, UK
2
Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) to their sub- Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy
scribers, including an accompanying document warning
Corresponding author:
about the potential negative consequences of this technol- Noortje Marres, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of
ogy,1 which led to a wave of media articles highlighting Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
the real dangers of this ‘controversial’ technology for Email: N.Marres@warwick.ac.uk

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2 Big Data & Society
society.2 In previous years, OpenAI had issued similar
statements: in February 2019, the company initially opted
against releasing the GPT-2 model (despite ultimately
making it available several months later), due to ‘concerns
about LLMs being used to generate deceptive, biased, or
abusive language at scale’.3 Similar concerns were made
public in May 2023 by the Chief Economist of OpenAI’s
parent company Microsoft, who went on record to state
that ‘I am confident that AI will be used by bad actors,
and yes it will cause real damage’.4 Such affirmations of
the dangers, harms and costs to society of this new wave
of so-called generative AI by their developers and backers
can be called ‘disruptive’ in their own right, as they break
with unwritten conventions that have underpinned public
communications about controversial science and innovation
in the last few decades: in notable controversies about tech-
noscience in the 20th century, concerning nuclear power,
climate change, and genetically modified (GM) food, the
companies involved consistently denied, refuted, deflected
or severely qualified claims advanced by civil society
actors about the harms and risks that their products
created for society. What is the significance of the seem-
ingly irresponsible affirmations by AI developers and
backers of the disruptions, risks and harms that are
created by their innovations, and what are the implications
of this for the role and status of public controversies about
contemporary AI?
One of the striking features of recent corporate ‘warn-
ings’ about the dangers that AI poses for society is that
they echo similar warnings that have been made by AI
critics during the last 5 years. When Geoff Hinton, the
‘Godfather’ of AI went public with his concerns about AI
in May 2023, and cited these as a reason to end his employ-
ment at Google, it was pointed out by many, in newspaper
editorials and on Twitter, that he had in 2018 failed to show
support when the computer scientist Timnit Gebru and
others on Google’s Ethics team, were fired or left the
same company citing closely related concerns, namely
that Google’s LLMs present a source of significant harm
to society.5 In this regard, Hinton’s actions can be inter-
preted as a discursive strategy of appropriation—a way of
disarming the criticisms of AI voiced by actors in society
by adopting a modified version of those criticisms as
one’s own, and mobilising one’s own authority as a credible
spokesperson of science and business to occupy the channel
of ‘public concern’ with AI, to the exclusion of out-group
critics.6 Indeed, this public communications strategy can
be understood as reflective of wider, institutionalised rela-
tions between industry and state, in which Silicon Valley
tech-company lobbyists seem assured that their ‘confi-
dence’ that AI will cause widespread societal harm will
not be sufficient cause for the state to restrict its develop-
ment in ways that are adverse to their interests (McGoey,
2021). However, even if the affirmations of AI’s harmful-
ness for society by its developers and backers have featured
more prominently in English-language media than similar
assessments by industry outsiders in recent years
(Dandurand et al., 2022), this does not necessarily mean
that ‘AI controversy’ can be reduced to these industry asser-
tions. To examine this, what is needed is a broad empirical
investigation of the ‘problematisations’ of AI that have
emerged from public debates about AI across the divide
between ‘AI insiders’ affiliated with big tech companies
and their civil society critics.
To this end, we have worked with UK-based experts in
‘AI and society’ to identify, qualify and evaluate the most
important and possibly overlooked controversies about AI
in the last 10 years, as seen from the UK. We asked:
which public controversies about AI during this period
achieved its problematisation, and how was this done? To
answer our question, we adopted a critical methodology
of controversy elicitation. To prevent our AI controversy
analysis from merely reproducing the strategic corporate
discourse about future risk and harm, we used techniques
of controversy mapping to selectively identify AI contro-
versies with the potential capacity to articulate problems
with AI across the divides between industry and civil
society, or more minimally put, between science and non-
science. We implemented this approach in a mixed
methods research design, which combined online consult-
ation with Twitter analysis and a participatory design work-
shop with AI and Society experts from across domains. As
we will discuss, this approach led us to identify two dis-
tinctive features of recent controversies about AI: (1)
Many significant AI controversies involve the mobilisation
of what we call ‘AI frictions’: concrete incidents such as
erroneous arrests based on incorrect facial recognition intel-
ligence, technical demonstrations of bias in operational
algorithms such as in recruitment, and walk outs by out-
raged tech company employees. (2) This proliferation of
AI frictions, however, does not entail the fragmentation of
AI controversy, but rather provides occasions for the articu-
lation of AI as a ‘super-controversy’: in AI controversies,
any individual dispute is inexorably chained to a variety of
other (overt and latent) problematics in and across research
and innovation communities, government and public sector
and wider societies. We argue that AI frictions enable a dis-
tinctive mode of problematising AI across science and non-
science, one that links technological propositions with experi-
enced harms and structural problematics in the areas of social
justice, knowledge politics and political economy.
How to uncover the capacity of AI
controversies for problematisation across
the science/non-science binary?
Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the appropriation
of critical discourse about technology and society by the
contemporary tech industry. Phan and colleagues (2022)
Marres et al.
describe how, when AI scientists at Google like Timnit
Gebru publicly contested the company’s lack of commit-
ment to addressing the societal harms and risks associated
with the LLMs it was developing, the effect was not to
endanger the company’s reputation. Instead, issues of risk
and harm became ‘ethicised’ and corporatised: they were
reframed by the company as concerns that could be dealt
with via internal processes centred on values rather than
regulation. Appropriation of the vocabulary of societal
risks and harms of technology can also be discerned in
contemporary scientific discourse on AI. For example, the
computer scientist Percy Liang observed during his intro-
duction to the ‘Foundation Models’ workshop at Stanford
University in 2021: ‘what I am seeing today is the very
beginning of a paradigm shift, [in the area of large language
models] and I think this paradigm shift is going to have
profound implications […] there will also be heavy social
consequences that will result from each technological
decision’.7 Such affirmations that LLMs and indeed subse-
quent generative AI models create new societal risks and
harms by AI proponents point towards a radicalisation
of a recent argument by Geiger and colleagues which
states that in contemporary capitalist societies, controversy
about science and technology increasingly serves as a
valuation strategy: a way of opening up markets for new
products and mobilising public concern to create a commu-
nity of attention for said products (Geiger et al., 2014).
In Geiger et al.’s accounts, techno-scientific controver-
sies are increasingly deployed towards promotional ends.
In the last decade or so, controversy has acquired a ‘posi-
tive’ association with the tech industry’s notion of
disruption (Geiger, 2020), the Schumpeterian idea that
innovation done well is destructive of existing societal
arrangements and will challenge social conventions. An
example of this is Google Glass, which was widely reported
in the media as controversial because of the fundamental
concerns with privacy and surveillance raised by these
networked wearables equipped with Facial Recognition.
Reviewing these controversies, the tech magazine WIRED
concluded: ‘Google Glass wasn’t a failure… it raised
crucial concerns’.8 This affirmative understanding of con-
troversy as valuation stands in tension with earlier framings
of controversy in Science and Technology Studies (STS),
which defined it as an enabling occasion for the democra-
tisation of research and innovation (Callon et al., 2011).
From this perspective, public disputes about
techno-scientific innovations, like nuclear power and genet-
ically modified foods, enable (1) the expansion of the range
of actors and competencies involved in the definition of
techno-scientific risks and harms (inclusion), and (2) a
process of the collective articulation of complex problems
at the intersection of science innovation and society
which are partly uncertain and affect different groups in
society in divergent ways (‘problematisation’). The stra-
tegic assertions of AIs controversiality by AI companies
3
and scientists do not fit this picture at all. Instead of
opening up the debate about the socio-technical problems
posed by AI to outsiders, these statements reassert the
authority of scientists and company insiders to define
techno-scientific risks and harms. Instead of facilitating
the problematisation of AI in the sense of surfacing its com-
plexity, uncertainty and heterogeneous effects in society,
these assertions present attempts to consolidate the defin-
ition of AI as objective reality, in line with Samuel
Johnson’s old empiricist dictum that if it hurts, it must be
real (Patey, 1986; on this point also see Kak and Meyers
West, 2023).
In other words, the strategic use of AI’s controversiality
threatens the role of public controversy as a force of the
democratisation of research and innovation, and risks to
undermine its capacity for inclusion and problematisation.
The reasons for this are surely complex. For one, artificial
intelligence (AI) research has been marked since its incep-
tion by oversized, objectivist claims about its existential
impact on humanity, claims which partly served as displays
of scientific authority and prowess (Suchman, 2023) Yet, as
Kling argued in Computerization and Controversy (1996),
in earlier decades controversy about automation did
provide important occasions for the collective definition
of social problems in compute-intensive societies, enabling
the articulation of ‘key value conflicts and social choices’
(Kling, 1996: xiv) concerning the future of work, surveil-
lance, privacy and problems of bias, as a way to ‘articulate
the different sides of key debates’ (xxi), and more generally,
to foster a greater appreciation for ‘computerisation’s key
social dimensions’ (xxii). Strikingly, many of the issues
flagged by Kling and other contributors to this volume
mirror today’s problems associated with AI. But where
Kling could still claim—in 1996—that the societal issues
raised by the computerisation of society ‘have not received
due attention’ (xxii), today’s media seem flooded by state-
ments to this effect. News media today endlessly circulate
‘explainers’ about why AI is controversial, as in the
WIRED article on Google Glass above, and they are awash
with reports of the societal harm that AI will or will not
cause in the form of job losses and worker exploitation, dis-
crimination by algorithm—as when UK students had their
General Standard of Secondary Education (GSCE) marks
downgraded by algorithmic rebalancing—and disinforma-
tion and deepfakes that will sabotage democratic elections.
However, it seems to us this mass reporting on AI’s harms
to society does not qualify as a collective process of
problem articulation. Recent studies of AI media discourse
in France and Canada have shown that this discourse
instead consolidates the binary that AI will either solve soci-
etal problems or cause epic harm (Crépel et al., 2021). And
far from widening the range of voices involved in AI
debates, the hyperbolic reports on AI benefits and risks that
dominate the news media feature primarily scientists and
industry representatives (Dandurand et al., 2022).
4 Big Data & Society
This situation not only has implications for our under-
standing of AI controversies as occasions for the democra-
tisation of knowledge; it also has consequences for the
methodology of controversy analysis. Since the early 20th
century (Mannheim, 2015 (1936)), knowledge controver-
sies have been valued as empirical occasions for exploring
wider relations between science and society: whenever
there is sustained disagreement in and about science—is
light a wave or a particle? Is nuclear power safe?—the
boundary between scientific insiders and outsiders is
troubled, and new ways of framing the phenomenon in
question become possible. Inspired by this insight, sociolo-
gists of science and technology developed the methodology
of ‘controversy analysis’ from the 1970s onwards.
Actor-network theorists defined controversies as opportun-
ities for the empirical observation of science-society inter-
actions: as controversies compel the actors involved to
account for their positions in the dispute, they are led to
make their relations explicit and, thus, describable by
social researchers (Latour, 2005). This approach provided
the basis for online controversy mapping, an approach
that uses techniques of data analysis and visualisation to
create representations of issues that are publicly contested
in digital media (Rogers and Marres, 2000; Venturini and
Munk, 2021). However, in the case of AI, assertions of con-
troversiality do not seem to have the illuminating empirical
effect that controversy analysis used to rely on: corporate
and expert discourse about ‘AI risks’ has the effect of ren-
dering civil society critiques of AI less visible and push
debates about the political and economic interests of the
tech industry into the background (Stark et al., 2021).
Assertions of AI’s controversiality by its proponents
exhibit features of a ‘pseudo-event’ (Parks, 2021): an orche-
strated publicity moment where ‘nothing happens’, an arti-
ficial rather than an empirical occasion. There is no lack of
expert contestation and societal debates about AI, but as
long as we ‘merely observe’ the unfolding of AI controver-
sies in popular and scientific media, as controversy
mapping said we should do, we are most likely to capture
strategic—not expansive and problematising—assertions
of AIs controversiality.
How, then, to analyse public controversies about AI
under these conditions? In this context, we propose, the
task of controversy analysis is not to ‘describe’ the positions
and relations of actors involved in AI controversies, but
rather to undertake an active search for problematisations
that AI controversy may still be giving rise to today. That
is, our hypothesis is that AI controversies today continue
to provide opportunities for the democratisation of
science and innovation, by expanding the range of actors
involved in AI debates beyond a narrow range of insiders
and for the shared articulation of complex problems.
However, such problematisations seem today in many
cases crowded out in public discourse by promotional
deployments of AI’s controversiality, which use the
language of AI harms and risks to consolidate the authority
of techno-science and the reality of AI. We ask: how to
uncover controversy’s capacity for the problematisation
of science and technology, in a context in which predomin-
ant debates about the benefits, risks and harms of contem-
porary AI seem focused on the consolidation of AI as an
objective reality? If, generally speaking, promissory and
eschatological framings of AI appear to dominate media
discourse, how can we identify AI discourses that enable
articulation and contestation of what is problematic about
AI across industry, science, media and society?
Methodology: From the observation to the
elicitation of AI controversies
It was clear to us, then, that if we wished to attend to societal
processes of the problematisation of AI, we would need to
diverge from predominant approaches in controversy
mapping. Contemporary AI controversies do not fit the
model of a generative empirical occasion: prominent
media and expert debates about AI cannot be relied upon
—in and of themselves—to bring to the surface qualifica-
tions of the societal consequences of AI or to make explicit
actors’ relations and interests. The usual research strategy of
controversy mapping, which is to query online media for
controversy terms such as ‘Nuclear waste’ or ‘GM foods’,
and then to document the positions that actors take on the
issue on Web pages and in social media, does not work in
this case (see also Munk et al., this volume). Indeed,
Twitter data that we collected using the query ‘AI’
between December 2018 and March 2021—which came
to 36 million tweets—seemed to us unsuitable for contro-
versy mapping: on initial exploration this data set appeared
to contain lots of publicity and little debate. If we were to
use this data to create a ‘controversy map’, there was a
real risk our analysis would merely end up reproducing
solutionist and doomsaying claims about AI—and their
associated authority and reality effects—without surfacing
articulations of AI as a collective problem. To locate the
latter, we decided, it was necessary to shift from the descrip-
tion to the elicitation of AI controversy. Declining to adopt
the empiricist posture of patiently tracing contestations
about AI wherever they emerge, we instead decided to
draw on design research methodology to devise strategies
to actively elicit a distinctive type of controversy about
AI: controversies with the capacity to problematise AI
across the science-non-science divide.9 Design researcher
Donato Ricci offered this helpful summary of this methodo-
logical re-orientation of controversy mapping:
If we [typically] spend a great deal of time to seek the
sources, detail the protocols and produce visual manipula-
tion[s] to identify “which data speak about which
actors”, an open lab, or better a lab that opens itself up,
could be one that also strives to produce the conditions
Marres et al.
under which “data make the actors speak.” (Personal
communication, 20 January 2021)
This proposal to deploy data to elicit controversy articula-
tion among actors as an open process bears some similar-
ities to the ‘collaboratory’ proposed by Collier (2007; see
also Ruppert et al., 2015), which he described as a designed
form of collaboration—‘a new networked organizational
form that also includes social processes’ (Collier, 2007: 2)
—and a key enabling condition for qualitative inquiry in
an age of big data. Rather than seeking to create a compre-
hensive representation of the principal points of contention
and actor positions on AI in different domains, we then
decided to use interventionist methods—in the form of an
expert consultation and a participatory workshop—to iden-
tify, qualify and evaluate a specific type of AI controversy,
namely those with the capacity to problematise AI across
domains, to bring new actors into the debate and to unsettle
established definitions of harm and risk (see Alfrink et al.
(2022) for a similar approach).
To structure this process of controversy elicitation, we
adopted the following three-step research design: first, we
actively configure a context for AI controversy elicitation,
by inviting a specific community of experts to assist us in
the identification of relevant controversies. As it is our
objective to surface problematisations of AI across
science and non-science, we decided to consult UK-based
‘AI and society’ experts. In a second step, we qualify AI
controversies: we define the type of topics and incidents
that the consultation surfaced and the problematisations of
AI they entail. Next, we analysed selected AI controversies
using social media methods and follow-up interviews, to
assess the extent to which they generated problematisations,
facilitated contestation and compelled exchange between
heterogeneous actors. In the third and last step, that of
evaluating AI controversies, we invited UK-based AI and
society experts into a design-led workshop, where we
worked together to create novel diagnoses of selected AI
controversies and their capacities for problematisation.
Convening an extended expert community
in the UK: What are the most important
and possibly overlooked controversies
about AI in the last 10 years?
To initiate our analysis of AI controversies, we began, as is
customary in controversy mapping, with a ‘query’ (Rogers,
2017). However, our initial query did not involve selecting
and submitting a set of keywords to an online platform API,
such as Twitter’s, but rather took the form of an invitation
email that we sent to 250 UK-based experts in ‘AI and
society’. Our decision to focus on this community was in
part informed by (1) our role in the international Shaping
AI consortium, a project in which we had taken on the
5
task of mapping research controversies about AI for the
period 2012–2022 beginning with the UK, and (2) by the
notable presence of civil society organisations active in
this issue area in the country.10 We thus began by selecting
actors with demonstrable expertise in AI and society, which
we did by identifying speakers and registered participants at
academic and professional events on the broad topic of AI
and society in the UK between 2021 and 2022, and which
included academic, industry and civil society conferences
and workshops.11 In so doing, we followed the STS assump-
tion alluded to above, that the capacity of controversy about
technoscience to surface emergent definitions of harm and
risk is in part a consequence of inclusion, an effect of the
involvement of a wider range of actors in the debate about
uncertain and problematic science and innovation. In line
with this assumption, we adopt a broad definition of
‘experts in AI and society’, whom, following Funtowicz
and Ravetz (1991), we define as members of an ‘extended
peer community’ and includes all ‘those with a stake in an
issue who are committed to genuine debate’ (Funtowicz
and Ravetz, 1991: 170).
Our respondents included civil society advocates and
activists (Amnesty, EDRi, Article 19), civil servants from
AI-related government units (Information Commissioner’s
Office, Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, NHSX),
academics with backgrounds in digital humanities, social
science and computer science and industry (AstraZeneca,
DeepMind), the arts (Serpentine Galleries; Ambient
Information Systems) and journalism (BBC, TechCrunch).
That is also to say, our research design did not specifically
target institutional outsiders, but rather focused on actors
who are involved in the articulation of AI harms, risks and
benefits in ways that cut across the science/non-science
binary. To counter-act authority effects, our consultation
explicitly encouraged respondent to give their own perspec-
tive on what makes AI controversial asking: (1) ‘What in
your view are the most important, and possibly overlooked,
controversies about AI in the last 10 years’ (italics ours)?
To enable us to explore their answers further, we added
another question: (2) What are notable moments, publica-
tions and/or individuals associated with the controversies
mentioned? To get at underreported issues associated with
AI, we asked: ‘Are there other controversies or problems
in and with AI research that you believe should be considered
as part of our study?’ The first round of the consultation was
sent out in November 2021 and completed by 53 experts.
We identified three different types of responses to our
consultation, which broadly correspond to the three ques-
tions we asked. A first set identifies (1) ‘controversial
topics’, broad areas in which controversial AI develop-
ments take place, such as ‘Algorithmic decision-making’,
‘AI warfare’ and ‘Environmental costs’ (see Figure 1). A
second set of responses mentions specific sites, incidents,
events and objects of contestation, concrete instances in
which AI caused disruption, trouble and, in several cases,
6 Big Data & Society
Figure 1. Frequency of occurrence of AI controversy topics in the UK expert consultation (Autumn 2021).
demonstrable harm in society (Amazon’s biased hiring tool;
data transfers without consent between the Royal Free
Hospital and DeepMind; the persecution of Uighurs in
China). We named these latter instances (2) ‘frictions’.
Building on Meunier et al.’s ((2021); see also Shaffer
Shane, 2023) work on ‘algorithmic trouble’, we use the
term ‘AI friction’ to denote instances of AI-related harms
occurring in specific environments in society (roads, hospi-
tals and schools), as distinct from more abstract and
de-localised societal risks. In a third and last set of cases,
respondents offered (3) problematisations of AI, which
we loosely defined as answers to the question ‘what is the
problem with AI?’; and more specifically, we understand
as attempts to articulate underlying contestations, difficul-
ties and suffering associated with AI that arise at the limit
of discourse (Barry, 2021) and which it may be challenging
to name (two examples from our consultation: ‘The claim
that AI exists today’; ‘Deploying non-transparent systems
to make decisions that directly affect people’s lives’).
Especially striking in our results was the prominence of
the aforementioned ‘AI frictions’ among the responses.
While our consultation asked respondents to identify ‘con-
troversial developments’ and ‘controversies’ in and about
AI, a significant number (41 out of 53 respondents) identi-
fied concrete incidents involving AI in society: traffic acci-
dents involving automated vehicles, the use of racially
biased facial recognition by the South Wales and
Metropolitan police, the downgrading of GCSE marks by
algorithms during the UK ‘exams fiasco’. It suggests that
in the area of AI and society, ‘controversy’—in the sense
of the staging of public disagreement about a specific
knowledge proposition—may not be the main form of con-
testation of AI, with the emphasis placed, instead, on the
demonstration of concrete instances of AI-related harm to
specific groups and institutions in society (students,
BAME, the National Health Service (NHS)). Also striking,
we found, is the comprehensive range of societal domains
identified in the responses, which ranged from law enforce-
ment, health, transport, the welfare state, education, media,
democracy, the economy (including recruitment and work)
and sports. This broad range of application domains—
which is nearly coterminous with society—has been
Marres et al.
identified as a sociological feature of digital innovation
(Lupton, 2014), but here it emerges as a feature of public
controversy about a digital ‘object’, AI. This feature, too,
stands in contrast to techno-scientific controversies of
earlier decades, which tended to be limited to specific soci-
etal domains (GM foods connect across agriculture, health
and economy; nuclear technology associates environment,
energy, human rights and the military).
Our initial consultation results suggested to us that AI
may qualify today as a super-controversy: AI controversies
do not only take the form of public contestation of specific
techno-scientific propositions, but arise from the linkage of
specific instances of harm and risk arising in society with
technical propositions and wider, structural concerns.
However, it is important to note that the consultation also
surfaced several knowledge controversies in the more
familiar sense of the term, that is, public contestation of
expert claims. The most frequently mentioned controversial
development was facial recognition, a topic which gave rise
to public disagreements in the UK from 2018 onwards as
civil society and academic experts asserted that facial rec-
ognition systems in use by the Metropolitan Police fail to
meet accuracy standards, while the Metropolitan Police
released an evaluation report which concluded that its
facial recognition systems are accurate and not racially
biased.12 Mentions of other notable topics in the consultation,
such as tracking and targeting, data and corporate research
culture, equally include references to expert disagreement as
in the case of the legality of data transfers without consent
between the NHS and DeepMind, and to debates about con-
troversial research papers like the Stochastic Parrots article by
Bender, Gebru et al. discussed below.
Next, we made a distinction between controversy topics
in terms of the degree to which they elicited detailed proble-
matisations in the consultation, as opposed to only being
indicated as a keyword, such as ‘surveillance’. What
stood out here for us is that, while some respondents
focus on specific problems (‘pseudonymisation not fit for
purpose’; lack of consent for the online scraping of personal
images by AI companies), many others specify AI’s contro-
versiality in relation to wider, structural problems such as
racism, privatisation of the public sector, scientific integrity
and lack of trust. Facial recognition is associated with
the unlawful use of technology in the public sector, as
well as ‘bad science’ and persistent racial and gender biases.
Problematisations associated with ‘corporate research culture’
included references to toxic working environments in corpor-
ate AI research leading to the suppression of independent
research. All these problematisations foreground power
dynamics, and many refer to entrenched societal inequalities.
However, it proved difficult to categorise problematisations,
and we therefore left these aside for the time being.
To pursue the exploration of AI as a ‘super-controversy’,
we proceeded to delineate AI controversies by identifying
couplings of (1) frictions and (2) controversial topics
7
from among the consultation responses.13 We thus adopt
a relational, data-driven approach to analysing AI ‘contro-
versy couplings’ (Costas et al., 2021) and define the empir-
ical object of our study as AI’s controversiality: we
deliberately leave open the question of the form and
formats that AI controversies take on in the empirical set-
tings in which we investigate them, making this a question
rather than an assumption in our research. To select AI con-
troversy couplings for further analysis from the many cou-
plings identified through our consultation, we relied on the
criterion of ‘research intensity’. As Question 2 of the con-
sultation asked respondents to provide links to publications
relevant to the controversy in question, we adopt a simple
frequency count of associated research publications—in
which we included investigative journalism, as well as
civil society reports—as a way to identify AI friction-topic
couplings for further research (see Figure 2). Also taking
into consideration the spread of controversy friction-topic
couplings across different expert communities and societal
domains, we selected the following five controversies for
further analysis:
1. Correctional Offender Management Profiling for
Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS): a controversy
about algorithmic discrimination in judicial systems
sparked by the ProPublica (Angwin et al., 2016) report
‘Machine Bias’.
2. NHS + DeepMind: a controversy about data sharing
between UK public sector hospitals and big tech
sparked by the Powles and Hodson (2017) paper on
Google DeepMind research in the Royal Free.
3. Facial recognition (Gaydar): a controversy about the use
of machine learning-based image analysis to predict
sexual orientation sparked by Wang and Kosinski
(2018).
4. LLMs (Stochastic Parrots): A controversy about bias in
large neural network models for encoding and generat-
ing text, sparked by Bender et al. (2021) ‘On the
Dangers of Stochastic Parrots’.
5. Deep learning (DL) as a solution for AI: a controversy
about the capacity of DL—the use of trained multi-
layer neural networks with large numbers of weight
parameters—to sustain the claims of artificial intelligence
research (Marcus, 2018).
AI and society controversies on Twitter:
Levels of disagreement, actor
composition, forms of engagement
Having identified these five controversies, our next step was
to analyse whether and how these controversies enabled the
problematisation of AI across the science/non-science
binary. Follow-up interviews with participants in the
online consultation offered some indication of the relevance
of this focus. In relation to the controversial collaboration
8 Big Data & Society
Figure 2. Friction-topic couplings identified in the expert consultation ‘what is controversial about AI?’ Autumn 2021.
between the NHS Hospital the Royal Free (London) and
Google subsidiary DeepMind, one respondent noted: ‘I
think that’s what happened with the NHS thing… [i]t sort
of broke out of the confines of people who were interested
in AI and privacy into something which had more general
currency’ (Interview 14EH); another noted that ‘[T]he
Google DeepMind Royal Free thing applies to my univer-
sity. And I’ve spoken with people at my university here
and I speak to people at DeepMind, basically, they don’t
see what the fuss was about… [s]o there’s a really interest-
ing… important point about who actually does learn lessons
from this stuff’ (Interview 22JS). To ensure we captured the
unfolding of AI controversies across societal domains,
we decided to conduct the next step of our controversy
analysis with Twitter data. Not only is Twitter a tried and
tested setting for controversy mapping (Burgess and
Matamoros-Fernández, 2016; Madsen and Munk, 2019),
but at the time we conducted this research it was still a
notable site of intersection between academic, journalist,
activist and industry debates. Our interviewees confirmed
this understanding of Twitter as a prominent forum for
tech controversies during the relevant period (2012–
2022), alongside discussion forum and instant messaging
platform Reddit and Discord. They referred to Twitter as
a site that ‘has enough experts, it’s open, [and] general’
(Interview 12SL); ‘[i]t gives you a feel for an issue’
(Interview 14EH), although we were also reminded
that ‘there’s a huge amount of virtue signalling in terms
of what you argue with people about [on Twitter]’
(Interview 13CR).
We created tailored Twitter data sets for each of our five
controversies, by designing Twitter API queries to capture
discussions about the controversial publications identified
through the consultation (see Figure 3).14 Next, to make
sure our data sets were pertinent to our selected AI contro-
versies, we manually classified ‘conversations’ in the data-
sets as in scope or out of scope.15 That is also to say, at this
stage of our research, we chose as our unit of analysis the
‘conversation’ as defined by the Twitter API: strings of
replies generated by a single tweet, which can be visualised
as a descending, inverted ‘tree’ structure of replies from a
given ‘origin tweet’ (Nishi et al., 2016). The guiding
concern in our Twitter analysis remained with the genera-
tive capacity of AI controversies, as outlined in Section 2:
to what extent do the papers in question enable the problem-
atisation of AI on Twitter through sustained disagreement
about determinate propositions among actors from diverse
backgrounds (science and non-science)? We asked:
what problem definitions in relation to AI are surfaced
through exchanges within extended expert communities
Marres et al.
Figure 3. Twitter data collection for five AI research controversies.
on Twitter? To what extent do these exchanges involve het-
erogeneous actors, cutting across science and non-science?
To answer these questions, we analysed conversations in
four dimensions: topics, levels of disagreement, forms of
engagement and actor composition.
We begin by coding conversations for controversy
topics, which first of all reveal significant shared concern
across all controversies with ethics, knowledge and social
justice.16 Other frequent themes are political economy as
well as data and data protection (see Figure 4). Speaking
generally, this topic distribution is not dissimilar from our
consultation findings. On Twitter, too, the impacts of AI
deployments on disadvantaged communities featured as
an especially prominent topic, as did the corporate owner-
ship of AI infrastructures and related barriers to the evalu-
ation and regulation of AI in society. Data featured
prominently both in debates about rights (privacy) and reg-
ulations (including GDPR) as did epistemic challenges of
reliability and transparency of data processing within
AI-based infrastructures. Epistemic concerns about the
quality of outputs of AI systems, and lack of adherence to
standards of scientific rigour in AI research also featured
9
in many conversations, topicalising scientific quality. All
controversies, finally, gave rise to society and justice
debates, which define harmful impacts of AI on society in
terms of discrimination, entrenched privilege, racism and
societal inequality.
We next tried to establish the degree of controversiality
of the identified topics, which we did by coding all in-scope
conversations for the level of disagreement, and then
assigning these codes to the topics addressed in these con-
versations (see Figure 5).17 Perhaps unsurprisingly, our
analysis shows that there is a general trend towards dis-
agreement: topics in all controversies tend to be placed
towards the more contentious rather than non-contentious
end of the spectrum. We note that the level of disagreement
is correlated with the volume of tweets produced on a
certain topic: In COMPAS, the three largest topics by
volume—bias, prediction and racism—tend to appear in
conversations with higher levels of contention. To
further qualify the controversiality of topics, we consid-
ered the ‘levels of engagement’ for each conversation:
the degree to which conversations elicited long and/or
wide threads of replies on Twitter (more about this
10 Big Data & Society

Figure 4. Most frequent themes across the five Twitter controversies.

Figure 5. Distribution of the most frequent topics per controversy according to their level of disagreement.
Marres et al.
below). We found that contentious topics do not automat-
ically correspond to a high level of engagement. It is true
that in COMPAS, Parrots and DL as a solution for AI, the
top topics by engagement tend to lean towards higher
levels of contestation. However, we found the highest
level of disagreement for science-related topics that
belong to the theme of knowledge (light green in the
visualisation), and secondly, in topics relating to
society and justice (in black), political economy (in
blue) and bias (in orange).
Next, we examined the extent to which our AI controver-
sies on Twitter facilitated interaction among heterogenous
actors, that is, exchanges across the science/non-science
binary. To this end, we categorised the Twitter accounts
contributing to each controversy using basic occupational
categories (see Table 1).18 We found that only a very
small number of Twitter accounts appear in more than
one controversy, suggesting that our five controversies
mobilised different Twitter ‘communities’, which is note-
worthy in the light of the high topic similarity between AI
controversies on Twitter in Figure 4. Considering the size
of actor categories across controversies, we can see that
some controversies lean more towards the ‘activist/media
side’, such as COMPAS, and others more towards ‘scien-
tific/research’, such as DL as a solution for AI, and some
are hybrid, such as the Parrots and Gaydar controversies
which bring together researchers and activists. NHS/
DeepMind is the one controversy where professions
(health) are prominent (see Table 2), and policymakers
are relatively absent in all the Twitter controversies. As
such, these findings demonstrate a truism from the soci-
ology of knowledge, which states that the content of a con-
troversy aligns with actors’ positions in society (Barnes,
1977), more about which below.
Finally, the calculation of ‘levels of engagement’ for
conversations enabled us to explore the extent to which
AI controversies on Twitter enabled a widening of engage-
ment with the issues at stake (inclusion) and the degree to
which they instigated processes of problem articulation
(problematisation). We took the ‘width’ of conversations
—many different users replying—as an indication of the
broadness of engagement, and ‘depth’—long reply chains
—as a mark of sustained engagement in the articulation of
issues.19 We found that the COMPAS controversy on
Twitter was comparatively inclusive, while the Stochastic
Parrots controversy evinced the most sustained engage-
ment, suggesting more active involvement in problem
articulation as a collective process. We note that, according
to this measure, inclusion is marked by a ‘reaction democ-
racy’ (Gerbaudo, 2022) logic of bursty but brief engage-
ment, while the longer shapes—sustained articulation—are
associated with strong, arguably more elitist, participation
from researchers in controversy. We visualised this
finding by assigning an overall impressionistic shape to
each controversy: controversies of which conversations
11
on balance exhibit a high width have a broad appearance,
whereas those with higher depth are characterised by
extended length (Figure 6).
As to the overall findings of our Twitter analysis, we are
especially struck by the strong emphasis on societal pro-
blems (racism, inequality) and political economy (market
concentration, data appropriation) in the selected AI contro-
versies, which aligns with the findings of our consultation.
However, on Twitter, we also found a strong engagement
with epistemic issues, in the form of concern with scientific
integrity and the science/politics tension (research vs. advo-
cacy) in AI research. The focus on these topics correlates
with the social positions of participants in the controversy:
epistemic concerns are topicalised in controversies with
prominent participation of researchers, while controversies
with strong activist engagement are more concerned with
issues of regulation, ethics and justice (Table 2). While
this alignment between discursive content and social pos-
ition is something social studies of scientific controversy
would lead us to expect (Barnes, 1977), a different aspect
of AI and society controversies on Twitter does not align
with this approach. Controversy analysts in STS have
argued that techno-scientific controversies surface com-
plexity and thereby disrupt received scientific and societal
problem definitions (Callon et al., 2011). But AI and
society controversies on Twitter rather seem to mobilise
established scientific and societal issue frames (transpar-
ency, pseudo-science, racism, inequality). Should we con-
clude that AI and society controversies on Twitter
consolidate entrenched problem definitions? In the conclu-
sion, we will reflect on the significance of this for our under-
standing of AI and society as an area of super-controversy.
Materialising AI controversies: shaping
controversies with design-led participatory
methods
We cannot forget of course that Twitter analysis provides a
highly partial perspective on AI controversies. Our Twitter
research, just as our consultation, captured particular
instances of controversy: for example, the COMPAS con-
troversy on Twitter was dominated by reactions to a celeb-
rity politician, AOC.20 In reality the controversies in
question unfolded across many different settings: for
example, the COMPAS controversy served as an exemplary
case study in policy communities (Selbst et al., 2019) while
notable DL controversies were on display during the ‘AI
Debates’ periodically held in Montreal in December of
2019, 2020 and 2022. The Stochastic Parrots controversy
is arguably the only one of the five selected where
Twitter served as the primary setting of controversy, but
this one, too, has a far more complex topology: internal
organisational processes at Google, including the firing of
Timnit Gebru and walk-outs staged by Google staff are
12 Big Data & Society

key events in this controversy. For this reason, we treat our
Twitter analysis as providing an initial qualification of AI
and society controversies in English-speaking contexts. In
the next and last step of our analysis, we used our Twitter
data mappings as a starting point for the evaluation of AI
controversies during a participatory workshop with AI
and society experts.
A central feature of our methodology of controversy
elicitation is to mobilise the standpoints of a situated com-
munity of experts to activate a collective process of problem
articulation, which is a key affordance of controversy. In a
design-led collaborative workshop that we organised in
March 2023 in London (Figure 7), we took this process
of situated elicitation of controversy one step further by
inviting 35 UK-based AI experts from science, government,
industry, activism and the arts, many of whom were respon-
dents to our initial consultation, to a design-led participa-
tory workshop. Drawing loosely on methods of evaluative
inquiry (Marres and de Rijcke, 2020), we designed a diag-
nostic exercise, in which we worked with participants to
assess the five selected AI controversies in terms of inclu-
sion and problematisation: the extent to which they
offered opportunities for participation, made visible pro-
blems with contemporary AI, and enabled shifts in the
Table 1. Actor categories across controversies
according to a zero-shot actor classification using a GPT-
3.5-series model (see Footnote 18).
balance of power within the wider domain of AI and
society. During the workshop, the invited experts worked
together in five small groups to evaluate the five controver-
sies, supported by material props.
After having been introduced to the five controver-
sies, participants worked with a diagnostic tool that
we had designed specifically for this purpose—dubbed
the ‘controversy shape shifter’—to determine the
‘shapes’ of the selected AI controversies. Asking
participants to cut paper strips to different lengths that
corresponded to values assigned to controversy para-
meters, we invited them to determine: the relevance of
the issues addressed, the degree of participation, the
location of the controversy (situatedness), and the allo-
cation of responsibility for addressing the problem
(power and solvability) (see Figures 8 and 9). We
offered the participants an explicitly normative overall
framing for this evaluative exercise, by asking them to
tell us: is the controversy in question in good or in
bad shape? To support their evaluations, we provided
participants with controversy ‘dossiers’, which included
a timeline of events, an actor list, key documents and the
Twitter analysis for each controversy. On this basis,
they determined the controversy’s ‘shape’ by assem-
bling long and short strips of cardboard guided by the
evaluative grid.
Participants were also encouraged to add notes to their
shapes—annotating the cardboard with pens—summarising
their evaluations based on either the dossiers provided or
their own knowledge and experience.
For the purposes of this paper, we want to highlight one
important result of this process of shaping AI controversies.
Many participant annotations drew attention to the fact that
AI and society controversies operate on two levels at once.
On the one hand, they uncover highly specific issues raised
by AI systems (e.g., a flawed data sharing agreement
between public sector and industry organisations; a prob-
lematic internal approval procedure for academic publica-
tion in the tech industry) but, on the other hand, they
expose major structural problematics (the politicisation of
science, abuse of power and inequality). While the

Table 2. Main topics of disagreement, main actors and overall form of engagement in selected AI research controversies on Twitter.

Style of
Controversy Main topics Prominent participants engagement

COMPAS Bias; datasets; racism; transparency Media; activism Broad

NHS + DeepMind Data protection; consent and trust; data Activism; professions Broad
sharing purpose
Gaydar Harms; validity; pseudo-science; bias Research; activism Deep and broad
Deep learning as solution Artificial general intelligence; human Tech industry; research Broad and deep
for AI vs. machine learning
Stochastic parrots Corporate research culture; Women in tech; Tech industry; research Deep
environmental impact
Marres et al. 13

Figure 6. Forms of engagement: the ‘shapes’ of AI controversies on Twitter.

Figure 7. Shifting AI controversies: shaping and reshaping AI with experts in AI and society, Friends House London, 10 March 2023.

COMPAS case, for example, focused on the racial bias of
this scoring software and its underlying data against
ethnic groups, the controversy equally exposed how the
use of algorithmic systems in the public sector amplifies
entrenched racial inequalities. The NHS + DeepMind
case dealt with technical requirements on the legality of
data sharing agreements (which were not adhered to in
this case), but simultaneously flagged a major structural
challenge of AI to both national and international public
policy communities, namely the appropriation of public
sector data by private companies, as well as growing Big
Tech’s control over the creation of public sector data
infrastructures.
During the workshop, debates about DL as a solution for
AI highlighted the role of everyday publics in the creation
training datasets for neural networks through their digital
participation. Also, what appears as a technical debate
about the ‘architecture’ of predictive models turns out to
14 Big Data & Society

Figure 8. The evaluative grid composed of five parameters: relevance, situatedness, power, participation and solvability.

Figure 9. Shaping of the DL as solution for AI controversy by AI and society experts.

have massive legal ramifications regarding the applicability neural networks to predict sexual orientation raised a
of contemporary copyright law to data infrastructures in major issue of societal harm by demonstrating that AI ana-
society. The Gaydar case’s controversy about the use of lytics could be used to expose people’s vulnerabilities, but
Marres et al.
also highlighted that scientists seek to take advantage of
specific ‘hype’ dynamics to attract attention to their publica-
tions. Finally, the Stochastic Parrots controversy was
perhaps the most dense in its articulation of intersecting
societal problematics, highlighting ecological impact (the
energy cost of training LLMs), the marginalisation of
ethical considerations in research debates, and the roles of
women in corporate AI research. This suggests to us that
AI and society controversies, while not necessarily unset-
tling established problem definitions in science and
society, nevertheless articulate unsettling connections
between technical applications of AI, experienced harms
and structural societal problematics. These sometimes
unexpected linkages found through the exploration of the
selected controversies led us to characterise the topic of
AI as an impressively generative ‘super-controversy’.
Conclusion
Our examination of AI and society controversies via an
online expert consultation, Twitter analysis and an evalu-
ative workshop has enabled the elicitation of AI controver-
sies in the following ways. Our online consultation with
UK-based experts suggests that recent controversies about
AI and society not only consist of public disagreements
about knowledge propositions (is AI accurate? How do
we know it is safe?) but involve demonstrations of socio-
technical frictions in society: occurrences, events and appli-
cations that instantiate the harm that AI does and could do
in concrete places, with impacts on specific social groups,
involving the products of specific companies. But the prom-
inence of AI frictions does not mean that AI and society
controversies are fragmented. Many of these frictions
offer demonstrations of entrenched institutionalised dis-
crimination against ethnic minorities and women amplified
by the uptake of algorithmic systems in the public sector
(COMPAS; the UK exams fiasco, the use of facial recogni-
tion by the police and in schools). Our Twitter analysis both
consolidated and complicated this finding of the relative
prominence of a situational demonstrational logic in
recent English language AI and society controversies. On
the one hand, social justice issues of racial/gendered
inequality and entrenched privilege, as well as problems
of political economy, such as the corporate ownership of
the means of knowledge production, featured prominently
among AI controversy topics identified on Twitter. But in
this setting, the focus on societal friction in the problem-
atisation of AI does not overshadow knowledge contro-
versy: on Twitter we equally found AI to be the focus of
contentious methodological and epistemological debates,
with disagreements about rigour, scientific quality and the
science/politics distinction being especially prominent.
We tentatively draw the following conclusions regarding
the capacity of AI and society controversies to facilitate
inclusion and problematisation across the science/
15
nonscience binary. On the one hand, the AI knowledge con-
troversies that we identified on Twitter demonstrate a
degree of inclusion, in so far they mobilised experts
across science, journalism, industry and activism on
Twitter, However, representatives of affected communities
did not feature prominently in them. It seems that it is espe-
cially through the type of controversy topics articulated in
the controversies in question that the expert/non-expert
boundary is crossed: these range from issues of social
justice to scientific methodology, politics of knowledge,
ethics and political economy. We note that classic societal
—and indeed sociological—problems, such as societal
inequality, and the demarcation between science and polit-
ics, play a central role in AI controversies, and arguably, are
rendered publicly relevant through them (on this point, see
also Roberge and Castelle, 2021). AI and society controver-
sies topicalise classic themes from the sociology of knowl-
edge—the social organisation of science, the role of
underlying interests in the structure of knowledge, bias—
and entrenched social problems: power differentials and
privilege, discrimination and inequality. This contrasts
sharply with the understanding of techno-scientific contro-
versy as a force of problem articulation that shifts attention
away from structural societal problematics such as class,
race and gender (Latour, 2005) towards ‘single issues’,
such as pollution or patient rights.
We therefore conclude that AI, despite the specificity of
its techno-scientific arrangements and many of the asso-
ciated problems, has acquired the status of a ‘super-
controversy’ through AI and society disputes. Contrary to
the expectation that public controversies about techno-
science surface contingent problems, AI and society contro-
versies instantiate and connect a range of structural con-
cerns across epistemic, political, economic and ethical
dimensions with AI. This could perhaps be observed most
starkly in the Stochastic Parrots controversy, which actua-
lised AI and society conflicts in the form of a located, per-
sonal experience of friction (‘Timnit Gebru fired’) and
connected social justice arguments (white privilege) with tech-
nical debates about the meaning of ‘meaning’ (i.e., whether
generative models ‘understand’ their outputs) and political
economy (corporate control over knowledge production).
In such a super-controversy, problematisation does not
just proceed through the creation of heterogeneous associ-
ation between specific actors and entities, as actor-network
theory suggested, but arises from the forging of connections
between techno-scientific propositions (AI)-situated trou-
bles and entrenched societal problems. The demonstration
of AI frictions seems to play an enabling role in this. In
this regard, their significance should not be understood
solely in terms of the particularisation of AI-induced
harm by associating these with specific persons, experi-
ences, deployments and environments. Equally distinctive
about AI frictions is their connective capacity: frictions
demonstrate to wider publics how ‘AI’ as a complicated
16
techno-scientific domain of application is, nevertheless,
closely and intimately connected with society-wide phe-
nomena, such as structural inequality. Through contro-
versy, the firing of a single researcher can topicalise
complicated connections between the political economy
of knowledge production, social justice issues and epi-
stemic issues of what constitutes scientific rigour. It is
also to say that, in the face of the strategic affirmation of
the controversiality of AI by its developers and backers,
advocates and experts in AI and society have undertaken
the problematisation of AI according to a different logic.
We are tempted to call this logic ‘sociological’ insofar as
it involves the demonstration of connections between spe-
cific technical propositions, contextual frictions and struc-
tural problems across social domains.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the respondents to our online consult-
ation ‘What makes AI controversial?’ as well as our intervie-
wees and the participants in the ‘Shifting AI Controversies’
workshop, without whose expert contributions this research
would not have been possible. We also thank our colleagues
and students in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies
at the University of Warwick who took on key roles to help
realise the workshop. We are grateful to all Shaping AI teams
for inspiring discussions.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for
the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This
work was supported by the Economic and Social Research
Council (Grant number ES/V013599/1).
ORCID iDs
Noortje Marres https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8237-6946
Michael Castelle https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6754-6516
Beatrice Gobbo https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7085-0017
Chiara Poletti https://orcid.org/0009-0003-4402-1137
Notes
1. OpenAI (2023) GPT-4 System Card. Available at: https://cdn.
openai.com/papers/gpt-4-system-card.pdf
2. See for example: Helmore E (12023) We are a little bit scared:
OpenAI CEO warns of risks of artificial intelligence. The
Guardian, 17 March 23; Ordonez V, Dunn T and Noll E
(2023) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI will reshape
society, acknowledges risks: ‘A little bit scared of this’.
ABC News, 16 March 23.
3. As stated in a blogpost published on the company website at
the time. OpenAI (2019) Better language models and their
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implications. Available at: https://openai.com/research/better-
language-models
4. Goswami R (2023) Microsoft economist warns of A.I. elec-
tion interference from ‘bad actors’. CNBC, 3 May 23.
Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/microsoft-
economist-warns-of-ai-bad-actors-meddling-with-elections.
html
5. Simonite T (2021) What really happened when Google
Ousted Timnit Gebru. WIRED, 8 June 21. Available at:
https://www.wired.com/story/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-
really-happened/
6. Merchant B (2023) Column: Afraid of AI? The startups
selling it want you to be. Los Angeles Times, 31 March 23.
Available at: https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/
story/2023-03-31/column-afraid-of-ai-the-startups-selling-it-
want-you-to-be
7. See Liang P (2021) Introduction to the Workshop on
Foundation Models. Centre for Research on Foundation
Models, Stanford University. Available at: https://crfm.
stanford.edu/workshop.html (accessed 23–24 August
2021).
8. Eveleth R (2018) Google Glass wasn’t a failure. It raised crucial
concerns. WIRED, 12 December 18. Available at: https://www.
wired.com/story/google-glass-reasonable-expectation-of-
privacy/
9. We adopt this more minimal distinction of science versus
non-science to highlight the importance of differences in
actor’s types of expertise and positioning in controversies
about science and technology, but without making assump-
tions about unequivocal belonging (to science, or society).
It was proposed to us by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, per-
sonal communication, May 2019 (see also Costas et al.,
2021).
10. Our standpoint approach to AI research controversies does not
restrict AI controversies to national contexts, but we assume
the national context as standpoint for our study.
11. Alan Turing Institute UK AI Showcase (2021), Ada Lovelace
at CogX (2021), Oxford AI Ethics Futures (2021), Ada
Lovelace Institute Data Stewardship (2021), Mozilla Fest
(2021); ArtAI Festival (2021); AI Summit (2021); UAL
Tech and Power (2021), AI World Congress (2021).
Respondents were included in our consultation based on
their demonstrable expertise in the area of ‘AI and society’,
which we identified through their bios, publications, and
other descriptions of their activities.
12. Big Brother Watch (2018) Face Off: The lawless growth of
facial recognition in UK policing. Report. Available at:
https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/campaigns/stop-facial-recognition/
report/; Fussey P and D Murray (2019) Independent Report on
the London Metropolitan Police Service’s Trial of Live Facial
Recognition Technology. University of Essex, Report.
Available at: https://repository.essex.ac.uk/24946/1/London-
Met-Police-Trial-of-Facial-Recognition-Tech-Report-2.pdf;
National Physical Laboratory (2020) Metropolitan Police
Service, Live Facial Recognition Trial. Report. Available at:
https://www.met.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/
central/services/accessing-information/facial-recognition/met-
evaluation-report.pdf
13. Couplings were identified in the data as follows: in coding
the consultation, we assigned responses to one of more
Marres et al.
categories (controversy topic, friction, and problematisa-
tion). Frictions and problematisations were assigned to
topics, where the latter were not explicitly identified in the
responses.
14. We created these data sets by constructing Twitter Academic
API queries. This involved an iterative process of testing
terms and URLs from the consultation, and quantitative
aggregation of subsets using the Twitter API. We set the
start date for data collection to one month before publication
of the relevant papers. Tweets matching our query as well as
all the replies and quote tweets were downloaded using the
Twitter ‘search all’ API endpoint. The controversial publica-
tions in question are: Angwin J, Larson J, Mattu S and
Kirchner L (2016) Machine bias. ProPublica, May 23 16.
Available at: https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-
bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing; Powles J and
Hodson H (2017) Google DeepMind and healthcare in an
age of algorithms. Health and Technology (Berl) 7(4): 351–
367; Wang Y and Kosinski M (2018) Deep neural networks
are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation
from facial images. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 114(2): 246–257; Bender EM, Gebru T,
McMillan-Major A and Shmitchell S (2021) On the dangers
of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?. In
Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness,
accountability, and transparency, pp. 610–623; Marcus G
(2018) Deep learning: A critical appraisal. arXiv preprint.
15. We also set a threshold for the minimum required number of
tweets in the conversation to 10 replies and/or quote-tweets
(an engagement-related criterion).
16. Each in-scope conversation was assigned 1–4 topics that sum-
marise the main issues addressed in the conversation with
relevance to the specific controversy. We then assigned each
topic to broader themes.
17. We assigned scores on a scale from 0 (no disagreement) to 2
(high indications of disagreement, indicated by the presence
of several contestational comments like ‘you’re wrong’,
‘no…’, etc.).
18. We categorised accounts manually by coding Twitter bio
descriptions for a sample of 1000 accounts randomly
selected for the Stochastic Parrots data set, and then,
based on the manual coding process, we designed a
prompt for a zero-shot actor classification of a random
sample of 1000 Twitter account bios for each data set,
using category labelling by the GPT-3.5 model endpoint
text-davinci-003. The term ‘zero-shot’ refers to the fact
that the model is neither ‘fine-tuned’ on domain-specific
example data, nor is it given explicit examples (‘few-shot’
learning), although model development did involve
‘instruction tuning’ (fine-tuning on human-generated dia-
logical examples) and reinforcement learning from human
feedback (Ouyang et al., 2022). More recent evidence sug-
gests fine-tuning on example data by social science
researchers would have improved our results (Ziems et al.,
2023). Inter-coder comparability was relatively low
between the manual and automatic coding. This can partly
be explained by the fact that we assigned only one category
to each bio, and prompted GPT to do the same, while many
bios listed multiple occupations. The GPT classifications
were found to be generally plausible, but further
17
examination of likely bias is clearly required (see also
Ashwin et al., 2023).
19. We ascertained the ‘level of engagement’ for each contro-
versy by calculating the width and depth of its in scope con-
versations, where ‘width’ refers to the highest number of
branching threads originating from an initial tweet, and
‘depth’ is the overall length of the conversation’s longest
thread.
20. One very large conversation in this data set originated from a
tweet from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. https://twitter.com/
RealSaavedra/status/1087627739861897216
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