ABSTRACT
Here I use aspects of Phil Graham’s discourse analytical work to examine forms of e/valuations and critically analyse the formulation of truths in the constitution of Artificial Intelligence (hereafter, AI). This paper focuses on two 2019 documents: Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI (AI HLEG, 2019a) and Policy and investment recommendations for trustworthy AI (AI HLEG, 2019b). My aim here is to provide a timely contribution to contemporary philosophical–methodological innovations in documenting the constellation of values that are prefigured in human-centric constructions of AI. The analysis is informed primarily by principles from Graham’s distinctive approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA), which I take to be the philosophical study of valuation. In that approach, political economy is taken as a composite formulation of values whereby neo-liberalism is discursively entwined and progressed through a system of principles of e/valuation. This paper presents a roadmap to demonstrate the usefulness of a philosophically grounded interdisciplinary piece of linguistic research through which evaluative semantic categories can be usefully synthesised with CDA to systematically expose the assumptions which underpin current truth claims and values – in this case, about and around the ethics of AI.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Correction Statement
This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2024.2302790)
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Nadira Talib
Nadira Talib is the author of Is It Time to Let Meritocracy Go? Examining the Case of Singapore (Routledge), which presents transdisciplinary methods for constructing a flexible philosophical–analytical model that integrates elements of music, art, and water–fluid dynamics through which to apply the analytic principles of critical discourse analysis for the interpretation of metaphors across historical policy texts from 1979 to 2019. This book offers an original re-examination of problems related to neo-liberal economic structural reforms, ethics, and equity. Her journal publications are featured in ScienceDaily, Bookforum, and in an editorial review of ‘The Top 100 Cited Discourse Studies’ (2015–2019) in the subject area of ‘linguistics and language’.