Research Areas:
AI and Social Impacts

The Tech Policy Lab is committed to advancing artificial intelligence in the public interest through research, analysis, and education and outreach.

Project Resources

  • Driverless Seattle: How Cities Can Plan for Automated Vehicles

    Preparing for the integration of a new technology such as autonomous vehicles into government processes requires forethought and was behind Driverless Seattle. Focusing on Seattle, this whitepaper identifies the major legal and policy issues that Seattle and similar cities will need to consider in light of new automated technologies.

    White Paper News

  • Resume Screening, Fast and Slow: (Biased) AI Recommendations’ Influence on Human Decision Making

    Research Paper

  • Diverging AI Governance Structures in the Indo-Pacific

    Research Paper

  • Examining Risks in the AI Companion Application Ecosystem

    Research Paper

  • Beyond Cooperative Simulators: Generating Realistic User Personas for Robust Evaluation of LLM Agents

    Research Paper

  • Deep Reasoning in General Purpose Agents via Structured Meta-Cognition

    Research Paper

  • Characterizing Resource Sharing Practices on Underground Internet Forum Synthetic Non-Consensual Intimate Image Content Creation Communities

    Research Paper

  • VEAT Quantifies Implicit Associations in Text-to-Video Generator Sora and Reveals Challenges in Bias Mitigation

    Research Paper

  • Beyond One-Way Influence: Bidirectional Opinion Dynamics in Multi-Turn Human-LLM Interactions

    Research Paper

  • Identifying Features Associated with Bias Against 93 Stigmatized Groups in Language Models and Guardrail Model Safety Mitigation

    Research Paper

  • What Are Chatbots’ Stereotypes About? A Data-Driven Analysis of Large Language Models’ Content Associations with Social Categories

    Research Paper

  • Biased AI Outputs Can Impact Humans’ Implicit Bias: A Case Study of the Impact of Gender-Biased Text-to-Image Generators

    Research Paper

  • No Thoughts Just AI: Biased LLM Hiring Recommendations Alter Human Decision Making and Limit Human Autonomy

    Research Paper

  • Bias Amplification in Stable Diffusion’s Representation of Stigma Through Skin Tones and Their Homogeneity

    Research Paper

  • Understanding experiences with compulsory immigration surveillance in the U.S.

    Research Paper

  • Characterizing the Default Persona During Design: Mental Representations of Technology Users are Gendered

    Research Paper

  • Persona-Assigned Large Language Models Exhibit Human-Like Motivated Reasoning

    Research Paper

  • Biases Propagate in Encoder-based Vision-Language Models: A Systematic Analysis From Intrinsic Measures to Zero-shot Retrieval Outcomes

    Research Paper

  • Intrinsic Bias is Predicted by Pretraining Data and Correlates with Downstream Performance in Vision-Language Encoders

    Research Paper

  • Talent or Luck? Evaluating Attribution Bias in Large Language Models

    Research Paper

  • VIGNETTE: Socially Grounded Bias Evaluation for Vision-Language Models

    Research Paper

  • Personalized Safety in LLMs: A Benchmark and A Planning-Based Agent Approach

    Research Paper

  • “We’re utterly ill-prepared to deal with something like this”: Teachers’ Perspectives on Student Generation of Synthetic Nonconsensual Explicit Imagery

    Research Paper

  • Analyzing the AI Nudification Application Ecosytem

    Research Paper

  • Directionality and Representativeness are Differentiable Components of Stereotypes in Large Language Models

    Research Paper

  • BiasDora: Exploring Hidden Biased Associations in Vision-Language Models

    Research Paper

  • Do Generative AI Models Output Harm while Representing Non-Western Cultures: Evidence from A Community-Centered Approach

    Research Paper

  • “I don’t see myself represented here at all”: User Experiences of Stable Diffusion Outputs Containing Representational Harms across Gender Identities and Nationalities

    Research Paper

  • Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model Retrieval

    Research Paper

  • “Violation of my body:” Perceptions of AI-generated non-consensual (intimate) imagery

    Research Paper

  • Global Gallery: The Fine Art of Painting Culture Portraits through Multilingual Instruction Tuning

    Research Paper

  • Safeguarding human values: Rethinking US law for generative AI’s societal impacts

    Research Paper

  • Tech Policy Lab Cited as Part of UW Law’s Technology Strategy

    An overview of University of Washington School of Law’s efforts to grow in the tech industry makes reference to the specialized work the Tech Policy Lab contributes toward inclusive tech policy.

    News

  • Atlas of AI – A conversation with Kate Crawford and Ryan Calo, Co-hosted by the UW Tech Policy Lab and Center for an Informed Public

    On Thursday, May 13th, the University of Washington’s Tech Policy Lab and Center for an Informed Public co-hosted a virtual book talk featuring Kate Crawford, a leading scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence and author of the recently published book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. The […]

    Video

  • Regulating Bot Speech

    This article in the UCLA Law Review is the first to consider how efforts to regulate bots, while falling short of per se censorship, might nonetheless run afoul of the First Amendment. The article further considers how premature regulation of bot speech may inadvertently curtail a novel and still emerging form of expression.

    Research Paper

  • Data Statements for NLP: Toward Mitigating System Bias and Enabling Better Science

    In research published in Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, experts in information science and computational linguistics investigate data statements as a practice to address critical ethical and scientific issues that result when systems developed with data from certain populations are used in systems with other populations.

    Research Paper

  • Towards Culturally Responsive Artificial Intelligence

    In August 2018 the Lab convened our second Global Summit, bringing together a global network of ethicists, political scientists, artists, policymakers, and technologists from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America to surface implications of cultural responsiveness for artificial intelligence. To explore these questions, we focused on storytelling as a uniquely appropriate vehicle for discussing pressing issues around AI. The 19 stories authored by participants have been published in the book Telling Stories: On Culturally Responsive Artificial Intelligence.

    News

  • AI in Public Sector: Tool for inclusion or exclusion?

    Applications of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the public sector are broad and growing, helping make decisions in welfare payments, immigration, fraud detection, healthcare, transportation, etc. However, the social equity and diversity implications of ML & AI in this realm are unclear. The panel will discuss the potential social and economic impact […]

    Video

  • AI Now: Social and Political Questions for Artificial Intelligence | Kate Crawford

    In March 2018, Kate Crawford gave the Tech Policy Lab’s Spring Distinguished Lecture on “AI Now: Social and Political Questions for Artificial Intelligence.”

    Video

  • Faculty Co-Director Ryan Calo Testifies Before German Parliament

    In June 2016 C0-Director Ryan Calo testified before the German Parliament, the Bundestag, as part of a hearing before the Committee on the Digital Agenda on "The Effects of Robotics on Economics, Labour and Society." He answered questions about the application of robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence for economic growth; and identified a number of issues regulatory issues legislators will face.

    Press

  • Peeping HALs: Making Sense of Artificial Intelligence and Privacy

    Research Paper
More Project Resources

Past Events

  • Data Statements at NAACL 2019

    Faculty Associate Emily M. Bender will present work on Data Statements with Co-Director Batya Friedman at the 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Event

  • Spring Distinguished Lecture with Kate Crawford | AI Now: Social and Political Questions for Artificial Intelligence

    In March 2018, Kate Crawford gave the Tech Policy Lab’s spring Distinguished Lecture on “AI Now: Social and Political Questions for Artificial Intelligence.”

    Event
    Video

  • Legal and Governance Implications of Artificial Intelligence

    In May 2016, the Lab and the UW School of Law co-hosted the first of four White House public workshops on artificial intelligence. Deputy CTO Ed Felton and other members of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy spoke on panels and were in attendance for the workshop.

    Event Video