# Participation is not a Design Fix for Machine Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.02423 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02423/

## Key facts

- Cited by 111 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 111)

- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [Improving alignment of dialogue agents via targeted human judgements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14375/) (2022)
- [The BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03915/) (2023)
- [The Participatory Turn in AI Design: Theoretical Foundations and the Current State of Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00907/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11410/) (2021)
- [Assessing the Fairness of AI Systems: AI Practitioners' Processes, Challenges, and Needs for Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05675/) (2021)
- [AI's Regimes of Representation: A Community-centered Study of Text-to-Image Models in South Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11844/) (2023)
- [Accountability in an Algorithmic Society: Relationality, Responsibility, and Robustness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05338/) (2022)
- [Queer In AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16972/) (2023)
- [Understanding Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities for User-Engaged Algorithm Auditing in Industry Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03709/) (2022)
- [Participation in the age of foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19479/) (2024)
- [Envisioning Communities: A Participatory Approach Towards AI for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01774/) (2021)
- [Seeing Like a Toolkit: How Toolkits Envision the Work of AI Ethics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08792/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Fairness: An Interdisciplinary Survey of Critiques of Hegemonic ML Fairness Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04460/) (2022)
- [Building Socio-culturally Inclusive Stereotype Resources with Community Engagement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10514/) (2023)
- [Real Risks of Fake Data: Synthetic Data, Diversity-Washing and Consent Circumvention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01820/) (2024)
- [Seamful XAI: Operationalizing Seamful Design in Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06753/) (2022)
- [Reality Check: A New Evaluation Ecosystem Is Necessary to Understand AI's Real World Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18893/) (2025)
- [Designerly Understanding: Information Needs for Model Transparency to Support Design Ideation for AI-Powered User Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10395/) (2023)
- [Imagining new futures beyond predictive systems in child welfare: A qualitative study with impacted stakeholders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08928/) (2022)
- [A Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis of Community-Collaborative Approaches to Computing Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04171/) (2022)
- [Gathering Strength, Gathering Storms: The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) 2021 Study Panel Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15767/) (2022)
- [NLP for Maternal Healthcare: Perspectives and Guiding Principles in the Age of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11803/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws Do Not Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03201/) (2023)
- [Beyond "Fairness:" Structural (In)justice Lenses on AI for Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08847/) (2021)
- [Going public: the role of public participation approaches in commercial AI labs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09871/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Multimodal Language Models as Visual Assistants for Visually Impaired Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22610/) (2025)
- [Bound by the Bounty: Collaboratively Shaping Evaluation Processes for Queer AI Harms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10223/) (2023)
- [The Future of Open Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16961/) (2024)
- ["Ownership, Not Just Happy Talk": Co-Designing a Participatory Large Language Model for Journalism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17299/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper critically examines existing modes of participation in design practice and machine learning. Cautioning against 'participation-washing', it suggests that the ML community must become attuned to possibly exploitative and extractive forms of community involvement and shift away from the prerogatives of context-independent scalability.