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.

翻译：在人工智能驱动语言技术的时代，聋人群体参与并主导手语技术开发的需求日益增长，这常被表述为共同创造。本文通过作者间的协作迭代对话，结合非正式参与者观察数据，审视了欧洲聋人联盟在EASIER和SignON这两个欧盟地平线2020项目中的参与情况。这些项目旨在开发手语与口语之间的移动翻译应用，将主要由听力正常、非手语技术专家与主要由听力正常的手语学者及代表聋人终端用户的组织汇聚于大型多合作伙伴联盟中。尽管共同创造有时被呈现为最佳或必需的研究方式，甚至被视作解放性实践，但它往往掩盖了权力失衡和象征主义等系统性议题。借鉴欧洲聋人联盟在这些项目中的经验，我们揭示了共同创造的若干令人不安的真相，并为未来倡议提出七项准则：承认聋人合作伙伴的无形劳动作为实际工作、管理对技术的预期、批判性解构共同创造流程、探索缓解共同创造疲劳的替代方法、寻求交叉性反馈、确保共同创造并非仅作美德信号、培养聋人在人工智能手语研究中的领导力。我们主张将共同创造视为根本改变现状、实现公平竞争环境的变革性活动。这需要增加聋人研究者数量，并提升聋人群体的人工智能素养。若缺乏这些关键的变革行动，共同创造恐将仅沦为对聋人群体的口头承诺。