Participation in the age of foundation models

TL;DR

The paper investigates how to realize meaningful public participation in foundation-model ecosystems, arguing that universal, context-agnostic models create a participatory ceiling. It analyzes existing participatory AI efforts through the Parameters of Participation and introduces a three-layer framework—foundation, subfloor, and surface—to enable domain-grounded agency and governance. Through clinical care, journalism, and financial services case studies, it demonstrates how a subfloor layer can coordinate data, governance, and accountability across downstream uses, while the surface layer enables task-specific participation. The work highlights benefits for accountability and equity, but also acknowledges risks like collaboration-washing and diffusion of responsibility, calling for ongoing research into decentralized, domain-specific governance structures. The blueprint offers a concrete path toward more inclusive governance of foundation models, aligning technological capabilities with the needs and rights of historically marginalized communities.

Abstract

Growing interest and investment in the capabilities of foundation models has positioned such systems to impact a wide array of public services. Alongside these opportunities is the risk that these systems reify existing power imbalances and cause disproportionate harm to marginalized communities. Participatory approaches hold promise to instead lend agency and decision-making power to marginalized stakeholders. But existing approaches in participatory AI/ML are typically deeply grounded in context - how do we apply these approaches to foundation models, which are, by design, disconnected from context? Our paper interrogates this question. First, we examine existing attempts at incorporating participation into foundation models. We highlight the tension between participation and scale, demonstrating that it is intractable for impacted communities to meaningfully shape a foundation model that is intended to be universally applicable. In response, we develop a blueprint for participatory foundation models that identifies more local, application-oriented opportunities for meaningful participation. In addition to the "foundation" layer, our framework proposes the "subfloor'' layer, in which stakeholders develop shared technical infrastructure, norms and governance for a grounded domain, and the "surface'' layer, in which affected communities shape the use of a foundation model for a specific downstream task. The intermediate "subfloor'' layer scopes the range of potential harms to consider, and affords communities more concrete avenues for deliberation and intervention. At the same time, it avoids duplicative effort by scaling input across relevant use cases. Through three case studies in clinical care, financial services, and journalism, we illustrate how this multi-layer model can create more meaningful opportunities for participation than solely intervening at the foundation layer.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Different categories of participatory approaches, along with the modes of participation (as described in delgado2023participatory) they currently cover. The bars are a qualitative depiction of the modes covered by each method -- e.g., dimensions for red teaming approaches we reviewed fell equally under consult and include; so the range spans both modes equally. The purple diamonds are exemplars of each category. In the domain-oriented efforts category, we illustrate the possibility for a few approaches to pass the participatory ceiling with the dashed bar. We describe these exploratory approaches in Section \ref{['sec:ceiling']}.
• Figure 2: An illustration of the three layers proposed in our blueprint.