Social Work in a Time of Algorithms: The Urgency of Interdisciplinary Collaboration on Artificial Intelligence Design, Development and Deployment

Artificial Intelligence (AI) impacts all fields of social work practice, as well as the broad range of people and communities that social work is committed to serving. With the 2022 launch of Open AI's ChatGPT, which captured the public's attention about AI and its capacities, we can no longer choose to disengage with the AI discourse. AI has been deployed in public and private sectors in ways that foreclose housing opportunities, bar individuals from employment, restrict access to healthcare services, and incentivize surveillance. AI systems have been deployed in ways that cause harm to people and their networks, such as false accusations of child abuse, exclusion from employment, inaccurate denials of unemployment and immigration asylum claims, as well as biased sentencing and wrongful arrests. In tandem with the exclusion of numerous and often marginalized groups from the design and development of AI tools, we lack resources for civil society organizations to demand accountability or equitable access to benefits of AI tools. It is time for us to think broadly and collectively about the impacts of AI on our practice, research and educational pathways. This round-table will bring together social work researchers who engage in diverse dimensions of social work and AI in order to explore how we can chart paths forward and make meaningful inroads on engaging AI scholars.

Navigating the algorithmic age is made complex by the many unresolved and still emerging ethical and policy issues. Beginning with how data is collected and what types of representation are included in the data, the current AI design and development cycle frequently creates conditions ranging from benign unintended consequences to unmitigated harms. Without transparency, explainability, and accountability, AI systems may also entrench digital marginalization and produce novel conditions of exclusion, particularly for people with low algorithmic awareness or AI literacy.

Context and power dynamics matter deeply but are often afterthoughts in the AI design cycle. Social work practitioners and researchers and the people who they serve are domain experts, and yet calls for social workers to "be at the table", helping to shape AI offerings feel empty or insincere as few social workers are invited into decision making before solutions are developed and sold to them. However, there is an urgent need for growth in social work research, teaching, and other forms of transmitted grounded knowledge on AI related topics, such as AI interventions, research methods, and socio-technical impacts.

This round table presentation will provide examples of Social Work AI research and multi-disciplinary contexts, discuss why social work has an important role to play in shaping the development of AI tools, and offer suggestions for engaging in interdisciplinary AI scholarship. At the conclusion of the session the authors will invite those who are engaged in research at the intersections of social work and AI to develop an article, with the aim of amplifying and sparking further cross-domain collaboration in the field.