When I talk to people in progressive organizations and communities, they are angry about the ways in which AI takes away their agency, and threatens their sovereignty over their own data. 

Agency is the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power. It is the capacity to make choices and act within a system. When I work with coaching clients, we explore how they can use their agency at work. I support them to analyze the power dynamics around them, including figuring out how much power they have. Often the people I work with, like I am in some ways, are constrained and structurally have less power. The spaces in which they can act powerfully have to be found and expanded. 

There are three ways I support them to step into their power and remember they have agency:

• Look for options even in a constricted place. You may have fewer options but it’s unlikely you have no options
• Understand the system as clearly as you can. See the freedoms and constraints of other actors in the system. Reminding yourself that they too are constrained, even though less constrained than you, can help you find places to act and push
• Imagine yourself into more agency and control. What will it feel like? What will you do with your new options? Play out the scenarios

When it comes to working with AI, I’ve been thinking about how these ideas of agency and sovereignty could apply. How can we ensure we have agency or sovereignty as we explore and maybe adopt AI tools? We can:

• Look for more options: We can use open-source models, or locally hosted models. We can choose tools that use less data. We could build a language model built from our threatened language, that protects our data and doesn’t extract it.
• Explore what AI providers’ power depends on: They need us as customers, our data, money, and trust. Can we set conditions, like no training on our data, clear data-deletion rules, evidence that workers are safe and fairly compensated? 

However, sovereignty is the power to shape, govern or refuse the system itself. Do these options overstate the power that an individual or a nonprofit organization has in the system? We’re still operating within conditions set by tech companies. So where does the search for sovereignty take us? It could take us to resistance, regulation, and maybe refusal. 

If you are interested in mapping out your organization’s ethical AI use and diving into these hard conversations, then give me a call! I’d love to work with you.

Thanks to Derek Alton at Civic Punks for this great podcast episode, Ukraine’s AI Playbook: Sovereignty, Agents and the Future of Government. Thanks to client conversations last week about agency and data sovereignty. Thanks to Tina Crouse for pointing me towards a TedxTalks UAlberta talk by Omar Yaqub called Fear to Flourish: The Future of Social Work.