Bridging Expertise and Participation in AI: Multistakeholder Approaches to Safer AI Systems for Youth Online Safety

This workshop will bring together interdisciplinary researchers, practitioners, and advocates to explore how youth-centered expertise can inform the design, deployment, and governance of GenAI systems while ensuring the online safety of youth. HCI and CSCW scholars have explored participatory and ethical dimensions of AI, but systematically integrating youth online safety experts, advocates, and young users themselves throughout the AI development lifecycle remains a critical gap. This integration is particularly imperative for Generative AI (GenAI), which amplifies risks such as misinformation, deepfakes, and manipulative personalization challenges that are difficult to anticipate or govern due to GenAI’s reliance on large-scale, general-purpose training data and its often unpredictable outputs.

To identify strategies for operationalizing multistakeholder collaboration and developing participatory tools, frameworks, and methods that promote safer, more inclusive AI,we will disscussions with a virtual pre-workshop session approximately two weeks before the conference, introducing one of the workshop’s core themes. Followed by an in-person conference workshop at CSCW to address the remaining themes. While GenAI is the primary focus, we welcome broader discussions on AI and youth online safety.