Yang Wang
Talk: Towards Ethical AI: Democratic AI Governance &
AI Safety for Youth
AI has made great strides in recent years. However, one key challenge is how to understand and improve the ethical aspects of AI. In this talk, I will present two recent projects in my lab. In the first project, funded by OpenAI, we created a novel socio-technical infrastructure to engage a diverse set of marginalized groups in democratic decision-making processes on designing and configuring AI systems such as ChatGPT. We leverage our expertise and prior work on designing for marginalized users and apply decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) mechanisms in democratic decision-making processes. We have built the inclusive.ai platform and ran large-scale experiments with participants from North America and South Asia and showed promising results of the platform [AIES25].
In the second project, I will present our project on aisafety4kids.org. We leveraged our prior work in working closely with high school teachers and students in co-creating hands-on labs that teach high schoolers about AI ethics. In that process, we observed that Generative AI (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT and Character.ai have become popular among these teenagers. We then conducted and published one of the very first empirical studies on youth and GenAI [S&P25]. We then created a comprehensive youth AI risk taxonomy that consists of over 80 specific types of risks [SOUPS25]. We then created YouthSafe, the first youth-centered AI safety benchmark and a corresponding safe guard model [CCS25].
BIO:
Yang Wang is a professor of information science and computer science (courtesy) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He designs inclusive privacy and security experiences for underserved users. He received an OpenAI Democratic Inputs award, NSF CAREER award, IAPP SOUPS Privacy Awards, Best Paper Honorable Mentions at CHI and CSCW, and a Top Privacy Paper for Policy Makers. He appeared on NPR, BBC and China Daily. His research has been generously supported by NSF, Department of Health and Human Services, OpenAI, Alcatel-Lucent, Meta/Facebook, and Google. He received his Ph.D. in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine.