By: Ingvild Bode and Hendrik Huelss
Published in: Open Research Europe
Date: March 2024
Summary
This essay critically discusses the interplay between artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and norms, focusing on the discipline of International Relations (IR). Here, norms are usually conceptualised as the products of reflection processes where actors debate and decide on “agreeable” standards. IR research on AI governance therefore turns towards international public and deliberative processes and their outcomes. But this risks missing two crucial pathways of how AI technologies may shape norms: first, how practices of designing and using AI technologies performed by actors at sites outside of the public eye make norms; and second, how design and use AI technologies may contribute to not only shaping normativity, in the sense of ideas of oughtness and justice, but also normality, in the sense of the average and the normal. We conclude that AI technologies pose an important challenge for research on norms and consequently require new conceptual and regulative perspectives.