Who Gets to Make AI Safe? Toward Participatory AI Safety

Who Gets to Make AI Safe? Toward Participatory AI Safety
As AI systems become embedded in everyday life, an increasingly important question is: who gets to define what it means for them to be safe? Technical safeguards and standardized benchmarks are essential, but users, workers, and impacted communities often encounter harms and tensions that conventional evaluations miss.

In this talk, I introduce participatory AI safety, an approach that brings these forms of situated knowledge into how AI systems are designed, evaluated, and governed. Drawing on our research spanning everyday algorithm auditing, community-centered AI design, and emerging relational systems such as AI companions, I will examine both the promise and limits of participation. Participation can reveal harms and values otherwise overlooked, but it can also shift substantial labor and responsibility onto the people experiencing AI failures. I will discuss how participatory approaches can complement technical evaluation while empowering people to shape AI rather than simply asking them to bear the burden of making it safe.

About our speaker
Dr. Hong Shen is an Assistant Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, where she directs the CARE (Collective AI Research and Evaluation) Lab. Her research focuses developing human- and community-centered approaches to understanding, evaluating, and mitigating AI harms. Her research has received awards at leading venues including ACM CHI and CSCW and has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, BBC, and The Guardian. She is a recipient of the Google Research Scholar Award, Microsoft Research Global AI & Society Fellowship, and Google Policy Fellowship.

How to Get There
Public transportation: Take the Orange Line to Ruggles or the Green Line to Northeastern University. Upon arrival to Khoury College, West Village H, take the elevator to the third floor, then turn left and proceed to Room 366.