ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Organizational Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1638257
This article is part of the Research TopicContesting Artificial Intelligence: Communicative Practices, Organizational Structures, and Enabling TechnologiesView all 6 articles
Contestation in Artificial Intelligence as a practice: from a system-centered perspective of contestability towards normative contextualization, situative critique and organizational culture
Provisionally accepted
- 1Eberhard Karls Universitat Tubingen Internationales Zentrum fur Ethik in den Wissenschaften, Tübingen, Germany
- 2Universitat Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
- 3Institute for Safety and Security Research, Hochschule fur Wirtschaft und Recht Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- 4Centre Marc Bloch Deutsch-Franzosisches Forschungszentrum fur Sozialwissenschaften, Berlin, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The mainstreaming of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in technologies of various application fields comes with a number of risks for data subjects, users, developers, intermediaries and other stakeholders. This includes, among other things, risks posed by technical unreliability, epistemic opacity, privacy intrusions and algorithmic discrimination. As a consequence, scholars of various academic disciplines have proposed contestability as a concept and design principle that supports stakeholders in challenging and possibly correcting the adverse effects caused by certain AI systems. Most of the academic work in this context has been carried out by scholars of Human-Computer-Interaction, Design Research and Public Law. Building on this important work, we discuss a number of exemplary practices and aspects that should, in our opinion, be considered within the scientific study of AI contestation. Moreover, we propose a shift in attention from system-specific features and mechanisms towards a stronger consideration of motivations for contestations, of critical practices in organizations and of a contextualization within legal regulatory regimes. This includes anticipating risks and effective means for contestation, co-creating among stakeholders, formalizing the translation from principles to practices for AI contestability, governing contestation in deployed systems, facilitating a culture for contestation rejecting AI, enabling external oversight and critical monitoring. These conceptual considerations will hopefully facilitate further research and empirical investigations on AI contestability in social science fields such as organizational studies, communication studies, science & technology studies and law.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence1, ethics2, public law3, contestation4, organizational studies5, communication6
Received: 30 May 2025; Accepted: 13 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hirsbrunner, Kleemann and Tahraoui. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Simon David Hirsbrunner, simon.hirsbrunner@uni-tuebingen.de
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.