Will Orr

Will Orr joins C+S from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. His dissertation, Manufacturing Dataset Quality: On the Contestations of LLM Training Dataset Creation, examines how data practitioners negotiate multiple and conflicting understandings of dataset quality and how those contestations shape the politics of AI systems. His research focuses more broadly on the practices and assumptions underlying how AI technologies are designed, evaluated, and governed. At Vanderbilt, he plans to develop his dissertation into a book manuscript while pursuing new research on expert data annotation labor for frontier AI companies and emerging regulatory standards for training datasets and AI governance. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Justice and Technoscience Lab in the Australian National University’s School of Regulation and Global Governance.