AI, Society & Social Work
A living resource for understanding what artificial intelligence is doing to people, practice, power, and society.
Most conversations about artificial intelligence begin with what AI can do.
This collection begins with a different question:
AI is changing more than how we write, search, work, and communicate. It is becoming part of relationships, healthcare, social services, workplaces, education, surveillance systems, public institutions, and everyday decision-making. Its development also depends on material systems of labor, energy, water, data, and corporate ownership whose costs and benefits are not evenly distributed.
For social workers and other helping professionals, these changes raise questions that extend well beyond whether we should—or should not—use AI in practice.
AI, Society & Social Work is a living collection from The Politicized Practitioner that tracks research, policy, reporting, professional guidance, and critical analysis about the social consequences of artificial intelligence.
The collection is designed to help practitioners, educators, students, researchers, and others follow a rapidly changing field without having to follow everything happening in AI.
Explore the Collection
Resources are organized across eight interconnected areas.
Human Behavior, Relationships & Wellbeing
How AI is affecting cognition, attachment, identity, intimacy, loneliness, mental health, decision-making, and our expectations of ourselves and other people.
Identity, Inequality & Algorithmic Harm
How AI intersects with race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, language, culture, access, representation, discrimination, and existing structures of inequality.
Health, Care & Human Services
AI in healthcare, mental health, social welfare, disability and aging services, caregiving, benefits systems, clinical decision-making, and the future of human service work.
Children, Families & Development
AI companions, childhood and adolescent development, parenting, privacy, identity exploration, relationships, learning, and young people’s increasing encounters with artificial agents.
Work, Economy & Corporate Power
Automation, changing professions, workplace surveillance, data labor, corporate concentration, commercialization, worker power, and who economically benefits from AI.
Information, Surveillance & Public Life
Privacy, data extraction, misinformation, synthetic media, expertise, surveillance, political communication, democracy, and changing ideas about what—and whom—we can trust.
Law, Borders & State Power
AI in policing, courts, corrections, immigration, borders, eligibility systems, public administration, regulation, and other institutions through which states exercise power.
Ethics, Environment & Collective Futures
Consent, responsibility, accountability, environmental costs, data centers, labor, community governance, resistance, collective action, and questions about which technological futures we choose to build.
Look Through More Than One Lens
The categories help organize the collection. They aren’t meant to keep issues separate from one another.
Across them, four questions are especially useful.
What is this doing to behavior, relationships, identity, development, health, or wellbeing?
Who benefits? Who decides? Who is surveilled, excluded, exploited, displaced, or harmed?
What environmental, material, labor, and global systems make this technology possible—and who bears their costs?
What should social workers and other helping professionals, educators, researchers, organizations, and policymakers understand, question, challenge, or change?
A single resource may belong to several areas and raise questions through several of these lenses.
How the Collection Is Built
Every entry in this library is selected and reviewed by hand before it is added.
Resources are drawn from academic research, professional publications, investigative journalism, advocacy reports, and public policy documents, with a preference for sources that engage seriously with the social, ethical, and structural dimensions of artificial intelligence rather than its technical mechanics alone.
Each resource is tagged by domain and, where relevant, considered against the four lenses of human impact, power, planet, and practice, so the same reading can be located from more than one angle depending on what a practitioner is looking for.
The collection favors depth and relevance over sheer volume. A smaller set of resources that is genuinely useful to practitioners is more valuable than an exhaustive archive that is difficult to navigate.
New resources are added on an ongoing basis as the field develops, and existing entries are reviewed periodically to keep summaries accurate and links current.
The Question Behind the Collection
Every resource in this library ultimately returns to the same underlying question.
Not just what AI can do, but what it is doing, to whom, and who gets to decide.
This collection exists so that social workers, and the people and communities they work alongside, can be part of that decision, rather than simply respond to it after the fact.