Expert Reports as Epistemic Participation: Knowing and Doing in Artificial Intelligence’s Environmental Debate

Abstract

This study examines how nonscientific organizations participate in debates on the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence (AI) through the publication of reports, thus shaping the acquisition and distribution of expertise in the technical public sphere. Drawing on Eyal’s two dimensions of expertise, as tacit versus explicit and individual versus distributed, we use three concepts that best exemplify the various combinations of expert attributes, namely, communities of practice, epistemic communities, and international knowledge institutions. Our findings show reports on AI’s environmental footprint enable organizations to simultaneously engage with communities of practice and epistemic communities, thereby blurring the boundary between practical and epistemic expertise. This development creates challenges for international knowledge institutions, which promote inclusion and global dialogue, but do not always account for disparities in the quality of evidence produced. We conclude by suggesting that reports provide a valuable lens for examining expert organizations’ tacit knowledge and discuss the implications for the technical public sphere’s capacity to advance notions of objectivity.