The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Community Planning
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The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Community Planning Justin B. Hollander 1
& Ruth
Potts 2
& Maxwell
Hartt 3
& Minyu
Situ 4
Received: 6 February 2020 / Accepted: 13 October 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract This paper examines the role and potential risk of artificial intelligence (AI) powered automated social media accounts in participatory planning processes and broader themes of community well-being. The rapid growth and massive uptake of social media has resulted in a surge in public interest to engage with others around key land development topics. Due to the low cost and high potential engagement, planners and policymakers have been quick to open electronic channels of participation to inform the decision-making process. Doing so has created an opportunity for subversion from groups with alternate and possibly nefarious interests. Anecdotally, we have found that automated social media accounts have been used to further inflate the voice, and therefore influence, of subversive groups in the land development and planning process. While scholars have begun to examine how tech-savvy social media users are manipulating political discourse through the medium of Facebook and Twitter, a dearth of research has yet sought to examine the potential harm that such manipulation could cause to online planning processes and resulting community well-being. This project seeks to explore the risks that social media manipulation might pose to online community discourse around land development and planning topics. To begin to gauge this risk, this paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the topic and makes recommendations for future research to measure and analyze the threat to Twitter community well-being posed by AI. Keywords Social media . Social bots . Participatory planning . Twitter community well-
being . Artificial intelligence . Literature review
* Justin B. Hollander [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
International Journal of Community Well-Being
Introduction Social media has changed the way in which people engage with urban issues1 by providing a digital landscape in which people can share their opinions on decisionmaking in real-time, ask questions, and actively participate in discussions around key areas of interest. Consequently, there has been a surge in public interest in using social media to engage with others around key place-based issues (Evans-Cowley 2010; Kleinhans et al. 2015). Policymakers and planners have recognized the value of such systems to engage a wide variety of stakeholders and inform decision-making processes at a low cost (Williamson and Parolin 2012). In doing so, they have also created an opportunity for subversion from groups with alternate and possibly nefarious interests (Bessi and Ferrara 2016; Brachten et al. 2017; Hegelich and Janetzko 2016). While public opposition to planning projects or “NIMBY-ism” (Not In My Backyard) is not a new concept, social media has created an a
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