Drinking Chai with Your (AI) Programming Partner: Value Tensions in the Tokenization of Future Human-AI Collaborative Work

The new technologies of generative AI present important ethical challenges for application design in relation to human work and future workplaces. Using an extended design fiction, we conducted a critical inquiry into possible futures of generative applications based in human activities. We explored potential benefits and harms. 30 members of our international workplace read the design fiction, rated each of the 13 brief chapters, and critiqued the narrative. We interpret their responses using value tensions (Value Sensitive Design) and design theories of refusal, non-use, and un-use. We propose situated refusal, a combination of value tensions and refusal theory, and we describe three major dimensions of that perspective: Who is guiding the work? How much voluntary adoption? Who else is affected by the individual worker’s decisions?