Meet Them Where They Are: Social Work Informed Considerations for Youth Inclusion in AI Violence Prevention Systems

To address the challenges posed by social media, school districts, law enforcement, and criminal justice organizations are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and predict harmful content online. Due to lack of understanding of language, cultural nuances, and social context, there are numerous impacts when AI technologies wrongly interpret youths’ posts as violent. As such, AI systems may create and reinforce new systems of marginalization and oppression, even put youth at risk by creating digital pathways to incarceration (Patton et al., 2017). We suggest social work ethical principles be integrated broadly as a framing guide for the development of AI technologies to prevent violence against and among youth and marginalized groups.