Date/Time
Tuesday
10 Dec 2024
2:15 pm - 3:25 pm
Location
210 South Hall
Event Type
Non-CSTMS Event
Valerie Black
Postdoctoral Scholar, UCSF, Decision Lab
The death by suicide of a disabled Black teen named Sewell Setzer III and his family’s lawsuit against chatbot company Character.AI have opened up renewed debate and uncertainty about AI safety. Our society is still in the midst of determining: In what ways are and should AI companies be responsible for the wellbeing of their users — particularly as chatbots increasingly blur the line between entertainment and care?
Drawing on multi-year ethnographic research conducted at both a Silicon Valley mental health chatbot startup and a suicide prevention hotline, this talk examines what users’ experiences reveal about the ethical complexities of seeking crisis support from AI. As AI introduces a new, ambiguous category of relationships that we must all learn to collectively navigate, how do we prevent disability from becoming grounds for victim-blaming users who experience harm, rather than a catalyst for better AI design and oversight?
Former STS DE student, Dr. Valerie Black, is an anthropologist and disability studies scholar whose work examines the social and ethical dimensions of human-AI relationships. Her ethnographic research investigates AI applications in mental health care emerging from the startup sector in both the US and Japan. Currently, she is a postdoctoral scholar at UCSF’s Decision Lab, where she serves as a disability justice–centered ethnographer and technology ethicist on multiple NIH-funded projects.
For more information regarding this event, visit the UC Berkeley School of Information.