Social Science Is Necessary for Operationalizing Socially Responsible Foundation Models
This addresses the need for socially responsible AI development by integrating social science insights to anticipate and mitigate harms, though it is incremental as it builds on prior work on technology impacts.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding and mitigating the social impacts of foundation models by proposing a conceptual framework that treats them as sociotechnical systems, advocating for interdisciplinary collaboration between AI and social science to promote socially responsible practices.
With the rise of foundation models, there is growing concern about their potential social impacts. Social science has a long history of studying the social impacts of transformative technologies in terms of pre-existing systems of power and how these systems are disrupted or reinforced by new technologies. In this position paper, we build on prior work studying the social impacts of earlier technologies to propose a conceptual framework studying foundation models as sociotechnical systems, incorporating social science expertise to better understand how these models affect systems of power, anticipate the impacts of deploying these models in various applications, and study the effectiveness of technical interventions intended to mitigate social harms. We advocate for an interdisciplinary and collaborative research paradigm between AI and social science across all stages of foundation model research and development to promote socially responsible research practices and use cases, and outline several strategies to facilitate such research.