A Workshop @ Aarhus Conference 2025
Date: August 18, 2025
Location: Aarhus, Denmark
Overview
Faced with multiple, intersecting crises, numerous computing technologies have emerged and interacted with the crises. Amidst the growing prominence of AI, the discourses on AI-related harms predominantly focus on AI deployment and use, shifting attention away from their social and structural underpinnings. In response, this workshop seeks to reflect and map how AI intersects with the crises through framing the costs of AI. With costs of AI we refer to the human and natural toll of AI systems, such as labor exploitation, environmental degradation, and perpetuated social inequality. Costs acknowledge the inherent and inevitable trade-offs in the development and use of AI systems, emphasizing the disproportionate burdens experienced in infrastructuring, improving, and maintaining AI and the need to account for and engage with various actors, especially those from the Majority World that tend to be overlooked in WEIRD (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) conceptions of AI ethics. We invite contributions on various forms of AI-related costs, and critical engagement with methods to approach and address these costs. This workshop aims to (1) map the various costs of AI; (2) explore and reflect on concepts, frameworks, and methods to approach and engage with them; and (3) foster exchanges and collaborations in an interdisciplinary community.
We invite position papers (2-4 pages, excluding references) in ACM format through the form: https://airtable.com/appfFR3NOD1StylcL/pag9zGOv8bZiEiGl8/form. We present the guiding questions and topics below and welcome further perspectives.
Guiding questions
What different types of costs of AI are there?
How can research communities meaningfully engage with AI-related costs?
Topics of Interest
Human labor in AI production and use: What types of labor are integral to AI pipelines? What are their contexts, conditions, and characteristics? What types of costs arise from these labor practices?
Infrastructures of computing: What are the consequences of the increasing and structural dependence on AI-related infrastructure controlled by tech giants?
Environmental costs of AI: How can we measure, quantify, track, and visualize the environmental impacts the AI sector brings? How can we conceive of climate justice given the uneven distribution of benefits and environmental impacts in AI development and use?
Alternative methods to engage with AI-related costs: What are the theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and empirical cases to strengthen negotiation, resistance, and re-imagining of AI costs and futures?
Please find further details in Workshop Themes and Topics and Submission.
Key Information
Submission Deadline: May 30, 2025
Notification of Acceptance: June 20, 2025
Extended Deadline: June 25, 2025
Notification of Acceptance: July 2, 2025
Workshop Date: August 18, 2025
Workshop Location: In person, in Aarhus, Denmark.
Contact
If you have any questions or need further information, please add them to the submission form or contact Tianling Yang (one of the organizers) at tianling.yang@tu-berlin.de.