This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used by social service agencies to handle cases involving child abuse, intimate partner violence and elder abuse. But a University of Iowa researcher and former social worker says the agencies need to establish safeguards to ensure that AI technology does not lead to bias against vulnerable or disadvantaged populations.
In a new study, Aislinn Conrad, associate professor in the School of Social Work, says AI systems can be useful, especially for tasks such as sifting through information to identify people considered at risk or to help agencies decide when intervention may be needed. But she warns that the technology could remove the human element that she says is critical to making informed, impartial decisions—especially when those decisions can lead to families being disrupted or marginalized. The findings are published in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research.
In the study, Conrad recommends that agencies put survivors at the center of decisions when AI is being used. In particular, she recommends: "AI can make us more efficient and effective, but only if we're willing to do the hard work of developing responsive systems that keep families safe without reproducing bias," Conrad says. "That's why I believe AI-safeguard frameworks are so critical right now." When she was a social worker, Conrad performed child protective services investigations and helped children in foster care safely return to their families.
Her territory covered a rural region in south-central Kansas where drug use and poverty were prevalent. Through this work, she became interested in how social service agencies monitor people in the system. "I saw the link between poverty and abuse over and over, and I began wondering, 'Is it really that poor kids are just more likely to be abused?
Or is it a surveillance issue because they come to the attention of social services more often?'" Conrad says. Her recommendations are timely for Iowa: In February, the state's Department of Health and Human Services partnered with Google to develop VISION, a new information system that uses AI to modernize how child welfare agencies manage cases and data. Conrad says VISION or other AI-enhanced systems could lead to information being unintentionally misused.
Data such as public assistance, housing instability or previous contacts with social service agencies could be flagged as signs of "risk" in an algorithm. As a result, families already facing an economic or social hardship may face more scrutiny. "When historical data shows that poor families and families of color have been disproportionately surveilled by child welfare systems, the algorithm learns that pattern and repeats it at scale, and does so invisibly," Conrad says.
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