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Societal AI Research Has Become Less Interdisciplinary

arXiv 2506.08738 ↗First posted 10 Jun 2025cs.CL cs.AI cs.CYcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become deeply embedded in everyday life, calls to align AI development with ethical and societal values have intensified. Interdisciplinary collaboration is often championed as a key pathway for fostering such engagement. Yet it remains unclear whether interdisciplinary research teams are actually leading this shift in practice. This study analyzes over 100,000 AI-related papers published on ArXiv between 2014 and 2024 to examine how ethical values and societal concerns are integrated into technical AI research. We develop a classifier to identify societal content and measure the extent to which research papers express these considerations. We find a striking shift: while interdisciplinary teams remain more likely to produce societally-oriented research, computer science-only teams now account for a growing share of the field's overall societal output. These teams are increasingly integrating societal concerns into their papers and tackling a wide range of domains - from fairness and safety to healthcare and misinformation. These findings challenge common assumptions about the drivers of societal AI and raise important questions. First, what are the implications for emerging understandings of AI safety and governance if most societally-oriented research is being undertaken by exclusively technical teams? Second, for scholars in the social sciences and humanities: in a technical field increasingly responsive to societal demands, what distinctive perspectives can we still offer to help shape the future of AI?

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 15 of its 31 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2025.

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References · 15

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  7. 2024Two Types of AI Existential Risk: Decisive and Accumulativecited by 22
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  10. 2023"That's important, but...": How Computer Science Researchers Anticipate Unintended Consequences of Their Research Innovationscited by 8
  11. 2021ESR: Ethics and Society Review of Artificial Intelligence Researchcited by 6
  12. 2020Like a Researcher Stating Broader Impact For the Very First Timecited by 5
3 more
  1. 2021Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence: Evidence from a Survey of Machine Learning Researcherscited by 5
  2. 2023Factoring Hate Speech: A New Annotation Framework to Study Hate Speech in Social Mediacited by 5
  3. 2022Human-in-the-Loop Hate Speech Classification in a Multilingual Contextcited by 3

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