Cited by 40Ethics and Social Impacts of AIArtificial Intelligence ApplicationsExplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Machine Learning Practices Outside Big Tech: How Resource Constraints Challenge Responsible Development

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Hopkins, Aspen, Booth, Serena·2021·Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

Abstract

Practitioners from diverse occupations and backgrounds are increasingly using machine learning (ML) methods. Nonetheless, studies on ML Practitioners typically draw populations from Big Tech and academia, as researchers have easier access to these communities. Through this selection bias, past research often excludes the broader, lesser-resourced ML community---for example, practitioners working at startups, at non-tech companies, and in the public sector. These practitioners share many of the same ML development difficulties and ethical conundrums as their Big Tech counterparts; however, their experiences are subject to additional under-studied challenges stemming from deploying ML with limited resources, increased existential risk, and absent access to in-house research teams. We contribute a qualitative analysis of 17 interviews with stakeholders from organizations which are less represented in prior studies. We uncover a number of tensions which are introduced or exacerbated by these organizations' resource constraints---tensions between privacy and ubiquity, resource management and performance optimization, and access and monopolization. Increased academic focus on these practitioners can facilitate a more holistic understanding of ML limitations, and so is useful for prescribing a research agenda to facilitate responsible ML development for all.

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Crossref · 10.1145/3461702.3462527

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  • Practitioners would avoid or limit model updates due to concerns about breaking their models and introducing more failures.

    “In another empirical study, Hopkins and Booth [23] found that practitioners would avoid or limit model updates due to concerns about breaking their models and introducing more failures.”

    From Improving Human-AI Collaboration With Descriptions of AI Behavior (2023) · cites this paper as Hopkins and Booth [23]

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Authors
Hopkins, A., & Booth, S.
Affiliations
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
Publisher
ACM
Published
2021-07-21
Pages
134-145
ISSN
3065-8365 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3190429087
Cited by
40
References
33
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 10
FWCI
6.33
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
  • Siebel Foundation
  • NSF
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Artificial Intelligence Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
Keywords
responsible AI development, resource constraints, startups, public sector, selection bias, resource management, performance optimization, existential risk

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