Aspirational Affordances of AI

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly permeate processes of cultural and epistemic production, there are growing concerns about how their outputs may confine individuals and groups to restricted narratives about who or what they could be. In this paper, we advance the discourse surrounding these concerns by making three contributions. First, we introduce the concept of aspirational affordance to describe how culturally shared interpretive resources, such as concepts, images, and narratives, can shape individual cognition, and in particular exercises of imagination. We show the usefulness of this concept for grounding the evaluation of psychological risks posed by AI. Second, we provide three reasons for scrutinizing AI's influence on aspirational affordances: AI's influence is potentially more potent, but less public, than that of traditional sources; the influence is not simply incremental, but ecological, transforming the entire landscape of practices that shape aspirational affordances; and it is highly concentrated, with a few corporate-controlled systems mediating a growing portion of production. Our third contribution is to advance such a scrutiny of AI's influence by introducing the concept of aspirational harm. In the context of AI systems, such harms arise when AI-enabled aspirational affordances distort or diminish available interpretive resources in ways that undermine individuals' ability to imagine relevant practical possibilities. Through three case studies, we illustrate how aspirational harms extend the existing discourse on AI-inflicted harms beyond representational and allocative harms, warranting separate attention. Overall, this paper aims to advance our understanding of the psychological and societal stakes of AI in shaping individual and collective aspirations.