Who owns artificial intelligence? This paper argues that the decisive question about artificial intelligence (AI) is not what it can do, but who owns it and for whose benefit it operates. Drawing on two historical precedents of cooperative electrification—the electricity cooperative of Crevillent, Spain (1925) and the rural cooperatives that emerged from the US Rural Electrification Act (1936)—it examines the concentration of ownership across the compute, data and model layers of contemporary AI. It contends that citizen participation, as practised under the label of participatory AI, will remain tokenistic, confined to the middle rungs of Arnstein's ladder, as long as the ownership of infrastructures is left out of the debate. The paper reviews publicly owned alternatives (ALIA, Apertus) and commons-based ones (data cooperatives such as MIDATA, following Ostrom), and reads the European AI gigafactories call as a crossroads for the ownership structure of European infrastructure. It concludes that AI ownership is a moral problem and proposes criteria for attaching conditions to public investment. ... Read more

This white paper aims to provide an introduction to the topic of Design for Justice for a wide audience. It demonstrates ongoing research on this topic by the TU Delft community and contributes to the exchange of relevant knowledge and expertise, as one of the outcomes of the activities organised for the Delft Design for Values Institute’s annual theme ‘Design for Justice’. This document includes recommendations on how to foster Design for Justice, which are not just relevant for designers, engineers, and academic researchers, but also for educators and policy makers. ... Read more