Overview

Human-Centered AI studies how AI systems can support people without undermining their agency, well-being, or relationships. Researchers use participatory design, interviews and field studies, accessibility and value-sensitive methods, and explainable AI to shape systems for settings such as healthcare, education, work, and assistive technology. As generative and agentic systems become more capable, evaluation is extending beyond benchmark accuracy to examine real-world outcomes, user experience, safety, and effects across different communities. A central tension is how to gain the benefits of automation and personalization while keeping systems accountable, inclusive, and under meaningful human control.

Latest papers

169 papers7 papers in the last four weeks, down 63% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Mar 31, 2026

Explainable AI for Blind and Low-Vision Users: Navigating Trust, Modality, and Interpretability in the Agentic Era

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is critical for ensuring trust and accountability, yet its development remains predominantly visual. For blind and low-vision (BLV) users, the lack of accessible explanations creates a fundamental barrier to the independent use of AI-driven assistive technologies. This problem intensifies as AI systems shift from single-query tools into autonomous agents that take multi-step actions and make consequential decisions across extended task horizons, where a single undetected error can propagate irreversibly before any feedback is available. This paper investigates the unique XAI requirements of the BLV community through a comprehensive analysis of user interviews and contemporary research. By examining usage patterns across environmental perception and decision support, we identify a significant modality gap. Empirical evidence suggests that while BLV users highly value conversational explanations, they frequently experience "self-blame" for AI failures. The paper concludes with a research agenda for accessible Explainable AI in agentic systems, advocating for multimodal interfaces, blame-aware explanation design, and participatory development.
Mar 31, 2026

Computational Hermeneutics: Evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology

Generative AI systems are increasingly recognized as cultural technologies, yet current evaluation frameworks often treat culture as a variable to be measured rather than fundamental to the system's operation. Drawing on hermeneutic theory from the humanities, we argue that GenAI systems function as "context machines" that must inherently address three interpretive challenges: situatedness (meaning only emerges in context), plurality (multiple valid interpretations coexist), and ambiguity (interpretations naturally conflict). We present computational hermeneutics as an emerging framework offering an interpretive account of what GenAI systems do, and how they might do it better. We offer three principles for hermeneutic evaluation -- that benchmarks should be iterative, not one-off; include people, not just machines; and measure cultural context, not just model output. This perspective offers a nascent paradigm for designing and evaluating contemporary AI systems: shifting from standardized questions about accuracy to contextual ones about meaning.
Mar 31, 2026

CounselReflect: Opportunities and Challenges for Designing Tools to Support Self-Reflection on Mental Health and Well-Being Conversations with AI

AI is increasingly used for mental health and well-being support, creating an urgent need for safer engagement, while design, evaluation, and governance take time to develop. We explore a complementary approach: helping users critically reflect on their own AI conversations. We introduce CounselReflect, a tool that translates literature-grounded counseling quality metrics into a user-facing reflection framework. Using CounselReflect as a study probe, we interviewed 21 users of AI for mental health and well-being support. Although most participants did not routinely reflect on their conversations, they articulated concrete questions they would want reflection to address. Tool-assisted reflection also revealed challenges: participants selectively sought evidence confirming existing perceptions of AI and prioritized dimensions they already valued. We argue that reflection tools should surface blind spots and scaffold more holistic examination of AI interactions. Finally, overcoming emotional barriers to revisiting tense conversations remains a major design challenge and warrants input from future work.
Mar 30, 2026

Self++: Co-Determined Agency for Human--AI Symbiosis in Extended Reality

Self++ is a design blueprint for human-AI symbiosis in extended reality (XR) that preserves human authorship while still benefiting from increasingly capable AI agents. Because XR can shape both perceptual evidence and action, apparently 'helpful' assistance can drift into over-reliance, covert persuasion, and blurred responsibility. Self++ grounds interaction in two complementary theories: Self-Determination Theory (autonomy, competence, relatedness) and the Free Energy Principle (predictive stability under uncertainty). It operationalises these foundations through co-determination, treating the human and the AI as a coupled system that must keep intent and limits legible, tune support over time, and preserve the user's right to endorse, contest, and override. These requirements are summarised as the co-determination principles (T.A.N.): Transparency, Adaptivity, and Negotiability. Self++ organises augmentation into three concurrently activatable overlays spanning sensorimotor competence support (Self: competence overlay), deliberative autonomy support (Self+: autonomy overlay), and social and long-horizon relatedness and purpose support (Self++: relatedness and purpose overlay). Across the overlays, it specifies nine role patterns (Tutor, Skill Builder, Coach; Choice Architect, Advisor, Agentic Worker; Contextual Interpreter, Social Facilitator, Purpose Amplifier) that can be implemented as interaction patterns, not personas. The contribution is a role-based map for designing and evaluating XR-AI systems that grow capability without replacing judgment, enabling symbiotic agency in work, learning, and social life and resilient human development.
Mar 30, 2026

Designing AI for Real Users -- Accessibility Gaps in Retail AI Front-End

As AI becomes embedded in customer-facing systems, ethical scrutiny has largely focused on models, data, and governance. Far less attention has been paid to how AI is experienced through user-facing design. This commentary argues that many AI front-ends implicitly assume an 'ideal user body and mind', and that this becomes visible and ethically consequential when examined through the experiences of differently abled users. We explore this through retail AI front-ends for customer engagement - i.e., virtual assistants, virtual try-on systems, and hyper-personalised recommendations. Despite intuitive and inclusive framing, these systems embed interaction assumptions that marginalise users with vision, hearing, motor, cognitive, speech and sensory differences, as well as age-related variation in digital literacy and interaction norms. Drawing on practice-led insights, we argue that these failures persist not primarily due to technical limits, but due to the commercial, organisational, and procurement contexts in which AI front-ends are designed and deployed, where accessibility is rarely contractual. We propose front-end assurance as a practical complement to AI governance, aligning claims of intelligence and multimodality with the diversity of real users.
Mar 27, 2026

Mimetic Alignment with ASPECT: Evaluation of AI-inferred Personal Profiles

AI agents that communicate on behalf of individuals need to capture how each person actually communicates, yet current approaches either require costly per-person fine-tuning, produce generic outputs from shallow persona descriptions, or optimize preferences without modeling communication style. We present ASPECT (Automated Social Psychometric Evaluation of Communication Traits), a pipeline that directs LLMs to assess constructs from a validated communication scale against behavioral evidence from workplace data, without per-person training. In a case study with 20 participants (1,840 paired item ratings, 600 scenario evaluations), ASPECT-generated profiles achieved moderate alignment with self-assessments, and ASPECT-generated responses were preferred over generic and self-report baselines on aggregate, with substantial variation across individuals and scenarios. During the profile review phase, linked evidence helped participants identify mischaracterizations, recalibrate their own self-ratings, and negotiate context-appropriate representations. We discuss implications for building inspectable, individually scoped communication profiles that let individuals control how agents represent them at work.
Mar 27, 2026

Channelling, Coordinating, Collaborating: A Three-Layer Framework for Disability-Centered Human-Agent Collaboration

AI accessibility tools have mostly been designed for individual use, helping one person overcome a specific functional barrier. But for many people with disabilities, complex tasks are accomplished through collaboration with others who bring complementary abilities, not solitary effort. We propose a three-layer framework, Channelling, Coordinating, and Co-Creating, that rethinks AI's role in ability-diverse collaboration: establishing shared informational ground across abilities, mediating workflows between collaborators with different abilities, and contributing as a bounded partner toward shared goals. Grounded in the Ability-Diverse Collaboration framework, grounding theory, and Carlile's 3T framework, it extends the ``agents as remote collaborators'' vision by centring the collaborative, interdependent ways people with disabilities already work.
Mar 26, 2026

Rethinking Health Agents: From Siloed AI to Collaborative Decision Mediators

Large language model based health agents are increasingly used by health consumers and clinicians to interpret health information and guide health decisions. However, most AI systems in healthcare operate in siloed configurations, supporting individual users rather than the multi-stakeholder relationships central to healthcare. Such use can fragment understanding and exacerbate misalignment among patients, caregivers, and clinicians. We reframe AI not as a standalone assistant, but as a collaborator embedded within multi-party care interactions. Through a clinically validated fictional pediatric chronic kidney disease case study, we show that breakdowns in adherence stem from fragmented situational awareness and misaligned goals, and that siloed use of general-purpose AI tools does little to address these collaboration gaps. We propose a conceptual framework for designing AI collaborators that surface contextual information, reconcile mental models, and scaffold shared understanding while preserving human decision authority.
Mar 25, 2026

Resisting Humanization: Ethical Front-End Design Choices in AI for Sensitive Contexts

Ethical debates in AI have primarily focused on back-end issues such as data governance, model training, and algorithmic decision-making. Less attention has been paid to the ethical significance of front-end design choices, such as the interaction and representation-based elements through which users interact with AI systems. This gap is particularly significant for Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, where humanizing design elements such as dialogue-based interaction, emotive language, personality modes, and anthropomorphic metaphors are increasingly prevalent. This work argues that humanization in AI front-end design is a value-driven choice that profoundly shapes users' mental models, trust calibration, and behavioral responses. Drawing on research in human-computer interaction (HCI), conversational AI, and value-sensitive design, we examine how interfaces can play a central role in misaligning user expectations, fostering misplaced trust, and subtly undermining user autonomy, especially in vulnerable contexts. To ground this analysis, we discuss two AI systems developed by Chayn, a nonprofit organization supporting survivors of gender-based violence. Chayn is extremely cautious when building AI that interacts with or impacts survivors by operationalizing their trauma-informed design principles. This Chayn case study illustrates how ethical considerations can motivate principled restraint in interface design, challenging engagement-based norms in contemporary AI products. We argue that ethical front-end AI design is a form of procedural ethics, enacted through interaction choices rather than embedded solely in system logic.
Mar 24, 2026

The Imbalanced User-AI Relationships as an Ethical Failure of Front-End Design in Healthcare AI

Ethical discourse on AI in healthcare has focused predominantly on back-end concerns such as bias, fairness and explainability, while the front-end interface, where patients and clinicians actually encounter AI outputs, remains under explored. This paper identifies imbalanced user-AI relationships as a distinct class of front-end ethical failure: patients are rendered highly visible to AI systems through data inference, yet cannot understand, question or influence how they are represented. Through the concept of asymmetric legibility and a chat-based telemedicine case, we show how design choices e.g., default recommendations, restricted inputs and suppressed uncertainty, undermine agency, clinician judgment and human oversight even where systems are technically accurate. We propose reciprocity as a design orientation and offer interventions for more balanced, participatory user-AI relationships in healthcare.
Mar 24, 2026

The EU AI Act and the Rights-based Approach to Technological Governance

The EU AI Act constitutes an important development in shaping the Union's digital regulatory architecture. The Act places fundamental rights at the heart of a risk-based governance framework. The article examines how the AI Act institutionalises a human-centric approach to AI and how the AI Act's provisions explicitly and implicitly embed the protection of rights enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It argues that fundamental rights function not merely as aspirational goals, but as legal thresholds and procedural triggers across the lifecycle of an AI system. The analysis suggests that the AI Act has the potential to serve as a model for rights-preserving AI systems, while acknowledging that challenges will emerge at the level of implementation.
Mar 23, 2026

From experimentation to engagement: on the paradox of participatory AI and power in contexts of forced displacement and humanitarian crises

Across the Global North, calls for participatory artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the responsible, safe, and ethical use of AI have increased, particularly efforts that engage citizens and communities whose well-being and safety may be directly impacted by AI and other algorithmic tools. These initiatives include surveys, community consultations, citizens' councils and assemblies, and co-designing AI models and projects. Far fewer efforts, however, have been made in the Global South, particularly in contexts related to humanitarian crises and forced displacement, where the deployment of AI and algorithmic tools is accelerating. In this paper, we critically examine participatory AI methods and their limitations in these contexts and explore the opinions and perceptions of AI held by displaced and crisis-affected communities. Based on a pilot exercise with communities living in Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya, we find important limitations in some participatory AI approaches which, if used in humanitarian contexts, could increase risks of so-called 'participation washing' and algorithmic harm. We argue that these risks are not predominantly driven by varying levels of understanding and awareness of AI but more closely linked to the fundamental power dynamics embedded within the humanitarian sector: between humanitarian aid recipients, service providers, donor governments, and host nations, as well as the power differentials and incentives that exist between AI companies and humanitarian actors. These structural conditions make the case not only for more rigorous participatory methods, but for independent governance architecture capable of holding humanitarian AI to account.
Mar 23, 2026

Implicit Humanization in Everyday LLM Moral Judgments

Recent adoption of conversational information systems has expanded the scope of user queries to include complex tasks such as personal advice-seeking. However, we identify a specific type of sought advice-a request for a moral judgment (i.e. "who was wrong?") in a social conflict-as an implicitly humanizing query which carries potentially harmful anthropomorphic projections. In this study, we examine the reinforcement of these assumptions in the responses of four major general-purpose LLMs through the use of linguistic, behavioral, and cognitive anthropomorphic cues. We also contribute a novel dataset of simulated user queries for moral judgments. We find current LLM system responses reinforce implicit humanization in queries, potentially exacerbating risks like overreliance or misplaced trust. We call for future work to expand the understanding of anthropomorphism to include implicit userside humanization and to design solutions that address user needs while correcting misaligned expectations of model capabilities.
Mar 20, 2026

Promoting Critical Thinking With Domain-Specific Generative AI Provocations

The evidence on the effects of generative AI (GenAI) on critical thinking is mixed, with studies suggesting both potential harms and benefits depending on its implementation. Some argue that AI-driven provocations, such as questions asking for human clarification and justification, are beneficial for eliciting critical thinking. Drawing on our experience designing and evaluating two GenAI-powered tools for knowledge work, ArtBot in the domain of fine art interpretation and Privy in the domain of AI privacy, we reflect on how design decisions shape the form and effectiveness of such provocations. Our observations and user feedback suggest that domain-specific provocations, implemented through productive friction and interactions that depend on user contribution, can meaningfully support critical thinking. We present participant experiences with both prototypes and discuss how supporting critical thinking may require moving beyond static provocations toward approaches that adapt to user preferences and levels of expertise.
Mar 19, 2026

Beyond the Desk: Barriers and Future Opportunities for AI to Assist Scientists in Embodied Physical Tasks

More scientists are now using AI, but prior studies have examined only how they use it 'at the desk' for computer-based work. However, given that scientific work often happens 'beyond the desk' at lab and field sites, we conducted the first study of how scientific practitioners use AI for embodied physical tasks. We interviewed 12 scientific practitioners doing hands-on lab and fieldwork in domains like nuclear fusion, primate cognition, and biochemistry, and found three barriers to AI adoption in these settings: 1) experimental setups are too high-stakes to risk AI errors, 2) constrained environments make it hard to use AI, and 3) AI cannot match the tacit knowledge of humans. Participants then developed speculative designs for future AI assistants to 1) monitor task status, 2) organize lab-wide knowledge, 3) monitor scientists' health, 4) do field scouting, 5) do hands-on chores. Our findings point toward AI as background infrastructure to support physical work rather than replacing human expertise.
Mar 18, 2026

Intellectual Stewardship: Re-adapting Human Minds for Creative Knowledge Work in the Age of AI

Background: Amid the opportunities and risks introduced by generative AI, learning research needs to envision how human minds and responsibilities should re-adapt as AI augments or automates various tasks and enters daily learning, knowledge work, and social life. Approach: Drawing on theories of learning, intelligence, and knowledge creation, this conceptual paper proposes intellectual stewardship as a human-centered, conceptually grounded framework for advancing creative learning practices with AI. Key points: Students and teachers work as responsible governors of intellectual processes distributed across human and artificial systems, guided by five core principles. Being knowledge-wise involves understanding the evolving state of knowledge and taking purposeful actions to advance it. Being intelligence-wise emphasizes making informed choices about how to orchestrate distributed cognitive processes and resources. Being context-wise requires sensitivity to recognize opportunities and risks. Being ethics-wise foregrounds ethical judgment, responsibility, and care in the use of knowledge and intellectual power. Finally, self- and community-growing defines the overarching purpose, aligning intellectual work with personal development and the advancement of collective well-being. Contribution: The principles provide a lens for viewing the adaptation of human minds in AI-infused learning environments, calling for the development of meta-level dispositions and capabilities that characterize wisdom-oriented, socially responsible knowledge builders in the AI age.
Mar 17, 2026

A Human-Centred Architecture for Large Language Models-Cognitive Assistants in Manufacturing within Quality Management Systems

Large Language Models-Cognitive Assistants (LLM-CAs) can enhance Quality Management Systems (QMS) in manufacturing, fostering continuous process improvement and knowledge management. However, there is no human-centred software architecture focused on QMS that enables the integration of LLM-CAs into manufacturing in the current literature. This study addresses this gap by designing a component-based architecture considering requirement analysis and software development process. Validation was conducted via iterative expert focus groups. The proposed architecture ensures flexibility, scalability, modularity, and work augmentation within QMS. Moreover, it paves the way for its operationalization with industrial partners, showcasing its potential for advancing manufacturing processes.
Mar 17, 2026

Human/AI Collective Intelligence for Deliberative Democracy: A Human-Centred Design Approach

This chapter introduces the concept of Collective Intelligence for Deliberative Democracy (CI4DD). We propose that the use of computational tools, specifically artificial intelligence to advance deliberative democracy, is an instantiation of a broader class of human-computer system designed to augment collective intelligence. Further, we argue for a fundamentally human-centred design approach to orchestrate how stakeholders can contribute meaningfully to shaping the artifacts and processes needed to create trustworthy DD processes. We first contextualise the key concepts of CI and the role of AI within it. We then detail our co-design methodology for identifying key challenges, refining user scenarios, and deriving technical implications. Two exemplar cases illustrate how user requirements from civic organisations were implemented with AI support and piloted in authentic contexts.
Mar 17, 2026

VIGIL: Towards Edge-Extended Agentic AI for Enterprise IT Support

Enterprise IT support is constrained by heterogeneous devices, evolving policies, and long-tail failure modes that are difficult to resolve centrally. We present VIGIL, an edge-extended agentic AI system that deploys desktop-resident agents to perform situated diagnosis, retrieval over enterprise knowledge, and policy-governed remediation directly on user devices with explicit consent and end-to-end observability. In a 10-week pilot of VIGIL's operational loop on 100 resource-constrained endpoints, VIGIL reduces interaction rounds by 39%, achieves at least 4 times faster diagnosis, and supports self-service resolution in 82% of matched cases. Users report excellent usability, high trust, and low cognitive workload across four validated instruments, with qualitative feedback highlighting transparency as critical for trust. Notably, users rated the system higher when no historical matches were available, suggesting on-device diagnosis provides value independent of knowledge base coverage. This pilot establishes safety and observability foundations for fleet-wide continuous improvement.
Mar 15, 2026

Inclusive AI for Group Interactions: Predicting Gaze-Direction Behaviors in People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Artificial agents that support human group interactions hold great promise, especially in sensitive contexts such as well-being promotion and therapeutic interventions. However, current systems struggle to mediate group interactions involving people who are not neurotypical. This limitation arises because most AI detection models (e.g., for turn-taking) are trained on data from neurotypical populations. This work takes a step toward inclusive AI by addressing the challenge of eye contact detection, a core component of non-verbal communication, with and for people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. First, we introduce a new dataset, Multi-party Interaction with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (MIDD), capturing atypical gaze and engagement patterns. Second, we present the results of a comparative analysis with neurotypical datasets, highlighting differences in class imbalance, speaking activity, gaze distribution, and interaction dynamics. Then, we evaluate classifiers ranging from SVMs to FSFNet, showing that fine-tuning on MIDD improves performance, though notable limitations remain. Finally, we present the insights gathered through a focus group with six therapists to interpret our quantitative findings and understand the practical implications of atypical gaze and engagement patterns. Based on these results, we discuss data-driven strategies and emphasize the importance of feature choice for building more inclusive human-centered tools.
Mar 15, 2026

Memory as Asset: From Agent-centric to Human-centric Memory Management

We proudly introduce Memory-as-Asset, a new memory paradigm towards human-centric artificial general intelligence (AGI). In this paper, we formally emphasize that human-centric, personal memory management is a prerequisite for complementing the collective knowledge of existing large language models (LLMs) and extending their knowledge boundaries through self-evolution. We introduce three key features that shape the Memory-as-Asset era: (1) Memory in Hand, which emphasizes human-centric ownership to maximize benefits to humans; (2) Memory Group, which provides collaborative knowledge formation to avoid memory islands, and (3) Collective Memory Evolution, which enables continuous knowledge growth to extend the boundary of knowledge towards AGI. We finally give a potential three-layer memory infrastructure to facilitate the Memory-as-Asset paradigm, with fast personal memory storage, an intelligent evolution layer, and a decentralized memory exchange network. Together, these components outline a foundational architecture in which personal memories become persistent digital assets that can be accumulated, shared, and evolved over time. We believe this paradigm provides a promising path toward scalable, human-centric AGI systems that continuously grow through the collective experiences of individuals and intelligent agents.
Mar 15, 2026

Towards Equitable Robotic Furnishing Agents for Aging-in-Place: ADL-Grounded Design Exploration

In aging-in-place contexts, small difficulties in Activities of Daily Living (ADL) can accumulate, affecting well-being through fatigue, anxiety, reduced autonomy, and safety risks. This position paper argues that robotics for older adult wellbeing must move beyond "convenience features" and centre equity, justice, and responsibility. We conducted ADL-grounded semi-structured interviews with four adults in their 70s-80s, identifying recurrent challenges (finding/ organising items, taking medication, and transporting objects) and deriving requirements to reduce compounded cognitive-physical burden. Based on these insights, we propose an in-home robotic furnishing-agent concept leveraging computer vision and generative AI and LLMs for natural-language interaction, context-aware reminders, safe actuation, and user-centred transparency. We then report video-stimulated follow-up interviews with the same participants, highlighting preferences for confirmation before actuation, predictability, adjustable speed/autonomy, and multimodal feedback, as well as equity-related concerns. We conclude with open questions on evaluating and deploying equitable robotic wellbeing systems in real homes.
Mar 14, 2026

Front-End Ethics for Sensor-Fused Health Conversational Agents: An Ethical Design Space for Biometrics

The integration of continuous data from built-in sensors and Large Language Models (LLMs) has fueled a surge of "Sensor-Fused LLM agents" for personal health and well-being support. While recent breakthroughs have demonstrated the technical feasibility of this fusion (e.g., Time-LLM, SensorLLM), research primarily focuses on "Ethical Back-End Design for Generative AI", concerns such as sensing accuracy, bias mitigation in training data, and multimodal fusion. This leaves a critical gap at the front end, where invisible biometrics are translated into language directly experienced by users. We argue that the "illusion of objectivity" provided by sensor data amplifies the risks of AI hallucinations, potentially turning errors into harmful medical mandates. This paper shifts the focus to "Ethical Front-End Design for AI", specifically, the ethics of biometric translation. We propose a design space comprising five dimensions: Biometric Disclosure, Monitoring Temporality, Interpretation Framing, AI Stance, and Contestability. We examine how these dimensions interact with context (user- vs. system-initiated) and identify the risk of biofeedback loops. Finally, we propose "Adaptive Disclosure" as a safety guardrail and offer design guidelines to help developers manage fallibility, ensuring that these cutting-edge health agents support, rather than destabilize, user autonomy.
Mar 12, 2026

ELLA: Generative AI-Powered Social Robots for Early Language Development at Home

Early language development shapes children's later literacy and learning, yet many families have limited access to scalable, high-quality support at home. Recent advances in generative AI make it possible for social robots to move beyond scripted interactions and engage children in adaptive, conversational activities, but it remains unclear how to design such systems for pre-schoolers and how children engage with them over time in the home. We present ELLA (Early Language Learning Agent), an autonomous, generative AI-powered social robot that supports early language development through interactive storytelling, parent-selected language targets, and scaffolded dialogue. Using a multi-phased, human-centered process, we interviewed parents (n=7) and educators (n=5) and iteratively refined ELLA through twelve in-home design workshops. We then deployed ELLA with ten children for eight days. We report design insights from in-home workshops, characterize children's engagement and behaviors during deployment, and distill design implications for generative AI-powered social robots supporting early language learning at home.
Mar 8, 2026

Directing the Robot: Scaffolding Creative Human-AI-Robot Interaction

Robots are moving beyond industrial settings into creative, educational, and public environments where interaction is open-ended and improvisational. Yet much of human-AI-robot interaction remains framed around performance and efficiency, positioning humans as supervisors rather than collaborators. We propose a re-framing of AI interaction with robots as scaffolding: infrastructure that enables humans to shape robotic behaviour over time while remaining meaningfully in control. Through scenarios from creative practice, learning-by-teaching, and embodied interaction, we illustrate how humans can act as executive directors, defining intent and steering revisions, while AI mediates between human expression and robotic execution. We outline design and evaluation implications that foreground creativity, agency, and flow. Finally, we discuss open challenges in social, scalable, and mission-critical contexts. We invite the community to rethink interacting with Robots and AI not as autonomy, but as sustained support for human creativity.
Mar 6, 2026

Evaluating Human-AI Safety: A Framework for Measuring Harmful Capability Uplift

Current frontier AI safety evaluations emphasize static benchmarks, third-party annotations, and red-teaming. In this position paper, we argue that AI safety research should focus on human-centered evaluations that measure harmful capability uplift: the marginal increase in a user's ability to cause harm with a frontier model beyond what conventional tools already enable. We frame harmful capability uplift as a core AI safety metric, ground it in prior social science research, and provide concrete methodological guidance for systematic measurement. We conclude with actionable steps for developers, researchers, funders, and regulators to make harmful capability uplift evaluation a standard practice.
Mar 6, 2026

Clinically Meaningful Explainability for NeuroAI: An ethical, technical, and clinical perspective

While explainable AI (XAI) is often heralded as a means to enhance transparency and trustworthiness in closed-loop neurotechnology for psychiatric and neurological conditions, its real-world prevalence remains low. Moreover, empirical evidence suggests that the type of explanations provided by current XAI methods often fails to align with clinicians' end-user needs. In this viewpoint, we argue that clinically meaningful explainability (CME) is essential for AI-enabled closed-loop medical neurotechnology and must be addressed from an ethical, technical, and clinical perspective. Instead of exhaustive technical detail, clinicians prioritize clinically relevant, actionable explanations, such as clear representations of input-output relationships and feature importance. Full technical transparency, although theoretically desirable, often proves irrelevant or even overwhelming in practice, as it may lead to informational overload. Therefore, we advocate for CME in the neurotechnology domain: prioritizing actionable clarity over technical completeness and designing interface visualizations that intuitively map AI outputs and key features into clinically meaningful formats. To this end, we introduce a reference architecture called NeuroXplain, which translates CME into actionable technical design recommendations for any future neurostimulation device. Our aim is to inform stakeholders working in neurotechnology and regulatory framework development to ensure that explainability fulfills the right needs for the right stakeholders and ultimately leads to better patient treatment and care.
Mar 5, 2026

Designing Explainable Conversational Agentic Systems for Guaraní Speakers

Although artificial intelligence (AI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems are often presented as universal solutions, their design remains predominantly text-first, underserving primarily oral languages and indigenous communities. This position paper uses Guaraní, an official and widely spoken language of Paraguay, as a case study to argue that language support in AI remains insufficient unless it aligns with lived oral practices. We propose an alternative to the standard "text-to-speech" pipeline, proposing instead an oral-first multi-agent architecture. By decoupling Guaraní natural language understanding from dedicated agents for conversation state and community-led governance, we demonstrate a technical framework that respects indigenous data sovereignty and diglossia. Our work moves beyond mere recognition to focus on turn-taking, repair, and shared context as the primary locus of interaction. We conclude that for AI to be truly culturally grounded, it must shift from adapting oral languages to text-centric systems to treating spoken conversation as a first-class design requirement, ensuring digital ecosystems empower rather than overlook diverse linguistic practices.
Mar 5, 2026

Cultural Perspectives and Expectations for Generative AI: A Global Survey Approach

There is a lack of empirical evidence about global attitudes around whether and how GenAI should represent cultures. This paper assesses understandings and beliefs about culture as it relates to GenAI from a large-scale global survey. We gathered data about what culture means to different groups, and about how GenAI should approach the representation of cultural artifacts, concepts, or values. We distill working definitions of culture directly from these communities to build an understanding of its conceptual complexities and how they relate to representations in Generative AI. We survey from across parts of Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Africa. We conclude with a set of recommendations for Culture and GenAI development. These include participatory approaches, prioritizing specific cultural dimensions beyond geography, such as religion and tradition, and a sensitivity framework for addressing cultural ``redlines''.
Mar 4, 2026

How Professional Visual Artists are Negotiating Generative AI in the Workplace

Generative AI has been heavily critiqued by artists in both popular media and HCI scholarship. However, more work is needed to understand the impacts of generative AI on professional artists' workplaces and careers. In this paper, we conduct a survey of 378 verified professional visual artists about how generative AI has impacted their careers and workplaces. We find (1) most visual artists are strongly opposed to using generative AI (text or visual) and negotiate their inclusion in the workplace through a variety of refusal strategies (2) there exist a range of factors in artists environments shaping their use of generative AI, including pressure from clients, bosses, and peers and (3) visual artists report overwhelmingly negative impacts of generative AI on their workplaces, leading to added stress and reduced job opportunities. In light of these findings, we encourage HCI researchers to contend more deeply with artists' desires not to use generative AI in the workplace.