The 9th AAAI / ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2026)
Location: Malmö Live, Malmö, Sweden.
Focus: Reimagining the institutions, practices, and values needed to govern AI responsibly.
Main Topics: Power and governance, ethical design, labor impacts, and social domains.
Website: www.aies-conference.com
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a pervasive, powerful, and contested feature of contemporary society. No longer experimental artifacts, AI systems now function as infrastructural components shaping governance, labor, knowledge production, and social relations. As these systems move from design into large-scale deployment, their societal impact is increasingly driven by processes of scaling and institutional entrenchment rather than technical choices alone.
With increased interplay between AI systems and their socioeconomic and geopolitical context, notably in terms of entrenching (or countering) power asymmetries and concentrated control, social and ethical questions around who controls, deploys and governs them are ever more relevant.
While AI has the potential to empower individuals and improve society, the ethical ramifications of AI systems and their impact on human societies require deep and urgent reflection. International organizations, governments, universities, corporations, and philanthropists have recognized this need to embark on an interdisciplinary investigation to help chart a course through the new territory enabled by AI.
AIES is convened each year by program co-chairs from Computer Science, Law and Policy, the Social Sciences, Ethics and Philosophy, and welcomes a broad range of methodological approaches, including empirical, normative, participatory, critical, and technical work. Our goal is to encourage talented scholars in these and related fields to submit their best work related to morality, law, policy, psychology, the other social sciences, and AI, encouraging contributions that make their methodological commitments explicit and speak meaningfully across disciplinary boundaries. Papers should be tailored for a multi-disciplinary audience while maintaining a strong focus on excellence in research. In addition to the community of scholars who have participated in these discussions from the outset, we explicitly invite disciplinary experts who are newer to this area and who seek to break new ground in their own fields by engaging with AI. Recognizing that a multiplicity of perspectives leads to stronger science, the conference organizers actively welcome and encourage people with differing identities, expertise, backgrounds, beliefs, or experiences to participate.