AI for Abolition? A Participatory Design Approach

2025/10/08 by Wang, Carolyn, Avriel Epps, Taylor Ferrari +4
Business, Management and Accounting · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Innovative Approaches in Technology and Social Development

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.07156

openalex publication_date 2025/10/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

The abolitionist community faces challenges from both the carceral state and oppressive technologies which, by empowering the ruling class who have the resources to develop artificial intelligence (AI), serve to entrench societal inequities even more deeply. This paper presents a case study in participatory design with transformative and restorative justice practitioners with the goal of designing an AI system to support their work. By co-designing an evaluation framework for large language models with the practitioners, we hope to push back against the exclusionary status quo of AI and extent AI's potentiality to a historically marginalized community.

Citations

• Data Feminism for AI
• The PRISM Alignment Dataset: What Participatory, Representative and Individualised Human Feedback Reveals About the Subjective and Multicultural Alignment of Large Language Models
• What's in a Name? Auditing Large Language Models for Race and Gender Bias
• Gender bias and stereotypes in Large Language Models
• Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model
• The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT's pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation
• Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks

Related

• Towards an Abolitionist AI: the role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities
• AI From the Margins (AIM): Rethinking Participatory AI Design Through the Lived Experience of Minoritized Communities
• Participatory AI: A Scandinavian Approach to Human-Centered AI
• Co-Producing AI: Toward an Augmented, Participatory Lifecycle
• Power to the People? Opportunities and Challenges for Participatory AI