Sociotechnical AI Governance workshop @ CHI · 2025
Bureaucratic Backchannel: How r/PatentExaminer Navigates AI Governance
Patent examiners play an underexplored role in the governance of artificial intelligence (AI), both as users of agency-deployed AI tools and evaluators of AI-related inventions. This paper investigates how examiners navigate these dual roles through a qualitative analysis of r/PatentExaminer, a Reddit community where U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) employees discuss their work. Using a mixed-methods approach, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to identify Reddit threads for qualitative review and analyze 134 AI-related discussion threads from the past five years. Our findings reveal that examiners, through online peer discussions, reinterpret policy, troubleshoot examination challenges, and contest AI-driven changes to their workflows.