What is Sociotechnical AI Safety? A participatory workshop about defining and expanding responses to sociotechnical risk in AI Safet

Andrew Smart and colleagues presented a tutorial session at FAccT 2024 that aims to broaden the discourse around AI safety beyond alignment and existential risks, incorporating perspectives from systems safety engineering and sociotechnical labour studies while emphasising participatory approaches. The research challenges the purely technical framing of AI safety, instead positioning it as a social, organisational, and political challenge that requires synthesising societal understanding with technical risk mitigation approaches – a particularly timely discussion given recent policy developments like the U.S. AI Safety Institute and EU AI Act.

For more detail please see the FAccT website here.