Lessons in co-creation: the inconvenient truths of inclusive sign language technology development

In the era of AI-driven language technologies, there is a growing demand for the participation and leadership of deaf communities in sign language technology development, often framed as co-creation. This paper, developed through collaborative and iterative dialogue between the authors with data from informal participant observations, examines the involvement of the European Union of the Deaf in two EU Horizon 2020 projects, EASIER and SignON. These projects aimed to develop mobile translation applications between signed and spoken languages, bringing together predominantly hearing, non-signing technology experts with predominantly hearing sign language academics and organizations representing deaf end users in large multi-partner consortia. While co-creation is sometimes presented as the best or required way to do research or even as emancipatory, it frequently masks systemic issues of power imbalances and tokenism. Drawing from EUD's experiences of these projects, we highlight several inconvenient truths of co-creation, and propose seven lessons for future initiatives: recognizing deaf partners' invisible labour as work, managing expectations about technologies, cripping co-creation processes, exploring alternative methods to mitigate co-creation fatigue, seeking intersectional feedback, ensuring co-creation is not just virtue signalling, and fostering deaf leadership in AI sign language research. We argue for co-creation as a transformative activity that fundamentally alters the status quo and levels the playing field. This necessitates increasing the number of deaf researchers and enhancing AI literacy among deaf communities. Without these critical transformative actions, co-creation risks merely paying lip service to deaf communities.