How to explain AI in an understandable way? Citizen scientists, AI experts and artists find answers together

Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently an omnipresent, yet quite abstract topic that affects all of us—whether we are aware of it or not. Therefore, explaining AI in an understandable way is a major challenge. As far-reaching AI is currently spreading in various areas of life, we consider it as extremely important that as many people as possible gain a basic understanding of AI, a certain “AI literacy”. Thus, we engaged in a participatory research project together with citizen scientists, artists and AI experts, addressing the question “How to explain AI?”. In a series of workshops, we brought together existing knowledge and burning questions about AI in our everyday lives from different perspectives, and developed new artistic forms of knowledge transfer for a better understanding of AI for non-experts. The outcome of this co-creation process was a selection of innovative approaches to foster a basic understanding and a realistic image of AI among the general population. In this paper we present the participatory process leading to these ideas.