AI safety needs social scientists
OpenAI Blog
Researchers at OpenAI argue that AI safety work must include social scientists to address how alignment algorithms function with real people rather than idealized humans. OpenAI plans to hire social scientists full-time to collaborate with machine learning researchers on this problem. This shifts AI safety research beyond technical engineering toward understanding human psychology, rationality, and decision-making biases that affect whether AI systems actually align with human values in practice.
Why it matters
We’ve written a paper arguing that long-term AI safety research needs social scientists to ensure AI alignment algorithms succeed when actual humans are involved. Properly aligning advanced AI systems with human values requires resolving many uncertainties related to the psychology of human rationality, emotion, and biases. The aim of this paper is to spark further collaboration between machine learning and social science researchers, and we plan to hire social scientists to work on this full time at OpenAI.
