Field Guide
AI Deployment Patterns
Recurring patterns in how AI systems are built, deployed, and used in the world.
These cards describe recurring patterns in how AI systems operate in the world. Each one names something you can actually look for – a way that a system classifies, measures, infers, or acts on people that tends to appear across many different contexts and applications. The patterns here are not hypothetical risks or abstract concerns. They are things that have happened, are happening, and will happen again, because they follow from how AI systems are built and deployed. Use these cards when you are reading a case, analyzing a system, or trying to name what you are seeing. Many of these patterns have antecedents in earlier automated systems – part of the analysis is recognizing what is continuous with the past and what AI makes distinctively different.
How data is made and used
Data does not arrive neutral. Before a system can predict, classify, or score, someone had to decide what to collect, how to measure it, and what it means. These cards help you ask how that process shapes what a system can see – and what it cannot.
How systems classify and sort
Every AI system draws lines – between normal and anomalous, qualified and unqualified, risky and safe. These cards help you ask where those lines are drawn, who drew them, and who bears the cost of being on the wrong side.
Visibility and surveillance
AI systems often make some people more visible to institutions while remaining opaque to the people they watch. These cards help you notice who can see what, what changes when people know they are being observed, and what asymmetric visibility does to power.
How systems act and shift power
AI systems don't just process information – they act in the world, redistributing authority and accountability. These cards help you trace who gains power, who loses it, and what happens to responsibility when a system makes a decision.
Who has voice and who bears risk
Who gets to shape a system matters as much as what the system does. These cards help you notice when affected communities were excluded from design, and when some people bear costs they had no hand in choosing.
Power, infrastructure, and alternatives
AI development concentrates resources, locks in dependencies, and forecloses alternatives. These cards help you see who controls the infrastructure others depend on, and what paths are being closed off.
Governance and refusal
Governance of AI is contested – and that contestation is itself a site of power. These cards help you notice how oversight gets framed, who has standing to challenge a system, and when refusing to adopt a technology is a legitimate response.