Mapping English-Language AI Research Controversies on Twitter, 2022

This submission consists of 12 data sets containing Twitter IDs pertaining to 6 AI controversies identified by UK-based experts in AI and Society as especially significant during the period 2012-2021.
The data sets were collected by researchers at the University of Warwick as part of the 3-year international project “Shaping AI” which mapped controversies about “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) during 2012-2022. Research teams in the UK, France, Germany and Canada analysed controversies about AI in their countries across different spheres: research, policy and the media during this 10-year period.
The UK team at the University of Warwick designed and undertook an analysis of research controversies about AI in the relevant period following a standpoint methodology. Our study began with an online consultation that took place in the Autumn of 2021, in which we asked UK-based experts in AI from across disciplines to identify what are the most important concerns, disputes and problematics that have arisen in the last 10 years in relation to AI as a strategic area of research.

Based on the responses to this expert consultation—described in detail in Marres et al (2024) and Poletti et al (forthcoming)—we identified a broad range of relevant controversy topics, objects and problems. To select controversies for further analysis, we considered their research intensity, in the form of a frequency count of research publications mentioned by respondents in relation to controversy topics.

On this basis, we selected 6 AI research controversies for further research: COMPAS; NHS+Deepmind; Gaydar; Facial recognition; Stochastic Parrots (LLMs) & Deeplearning as a solution for AI. For each of these controversies, we collected Twitter data by submitting queries to Twitter's academic API using TWARC between January 2022 and June 2022. Further details of the methods of data collection and curation can be found in the methods file with further detail of the queries in the ReadMe file.