The future of AI is
social-centered.
Founded by Professor Skyler Wang at McGill University, the Social-Centered AI (SCAI; pronounced ‘sky’) Lab is a research collective that supports interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of AI & Society.
Social-centered AI calls for a shift away from human-centered individualism toward an approach that evaluates how AI systems reshape social groups, institutions, and the norms that bind them.
From user-machine interactions →
context-based understanding
Recognizing that AI must be evaluated not just at the interface level, but within the social contexts, group dynamics, and institutional forces that shape how people actually use—and are affected by—these systems.
From solely taking care of individual users →
taking care of society
Going beyond exclusively protecting individual users from poor performance, hallucination, bias, and toxicity to anticipating second-order impacts across education, creative arts, work, and other societal domains over time.
From net-benefit thinking →
equity-driven analysis
Transcending simplistic “good or bad for society” framings to ask who benefits, who is burdened, and how AI impacts are distributed unevenly across communities.
Dive deeper into the full argument in our Big Data & Society article.
Current focus areas
Human-AI intimacy
Mental health chatbots
Trust in multimodal LLMs
Expert data annotation
Machine learning epistemic cultures
If you share our interest in the sociology of technology & AI or human-computer interaction, do not hesitate to reach out to see if we have any openings for undergraduate/graduate research assistant or affiliate positions! Requests for collaborations are always welcome!