Steven Luo

Genevieve Smith, Hiral Patel, Steven Luo et al.

Debates over open source and openness in artificial intelligence have intensified as policymakers, researchers, and practitioners grapple with how foundation models should be developed and governed to balance innovation, accountability, and public interest. However, there has been limited empirical work examining how diverse stakeholders collectively understand and negotiate responsible openness in AI, particularly through participatory processes that extend beyond industry-led definitions and frameworks. This paper presents findings from a multi-sectoral workshop grounded in futures thinking and participatory design methods. The workshop generated co-created visions of desirable futures and the role of AI, alongside a set of action pathways and a research roadmap focused on responsible open source and openness in AI. This paper makes three key contributions. First, it empirically documents the co-created visions, actions, and research priorities. Second, it identifies four core tensions that emerged as participants translated high-level aspirations into concrete actions, revealing conflicting interpretations of openness regarding its purpose (as an end or a means), its scope (expansion versus meaningful access), and its operation (mandatory versus conditional, sufficient versus dependent on governance and use). These tensions illustrate that responsible openness is not a singular technical solution, but a negotiated sociotechnical project shaped by values, positionalities, and priorities. Third, the paper advances methodological approaches in AI governance by demonstrating how participatory futures methods can surface plural visions, actions, and research priorities that extend beyond dominant, largely corporate, narratives, offering empirical insight into how openness, power, and accountability are negotiated in practice.

Jonathan Stray, David Zhai Yang, Steven Luo et al.

As AI systems increasingly shape political views, defining and evaluating AI political neutrality is an urgent problem. Here, we propose a new definition of AI political neutrality and design a large-scale user study to test it, releasing a new dataset PARETO with 7,434 participants and 208,152 evaluations of AI responses. Our definition follows a simple principle grounded in political theory: when asked about a controversial issue, an AI model should generate responses that maximize approval across groups with opposing viewpoints, while balancing approval between groups. This definition allows empirical testing of whether an AI response is "neutral" and generalizes to any political context without pre-supposing a single left-right axis of division. We construct a benchmark of controversial U.S. issues, with prompts sourced from politically charged questions on Reddit and responses from frontier AI models, and recruit human participants to rate AI responses. Across all 20 issues, we find that it is possible for AI responses to achieve high rates of approval on both sides, even as those sides disagree strongly with each other on the substance of the issues. We also find that default responses lean liberal for GPT, Gemini, Claude, and Llama, but not Grok, and that user prompts with political charges are harder to respond to than neutral prompts. This work introduces a rigorous definition and benchmark of AI political neutrality, and a dataset to measure progress toward it.