Researchers launch new tool measuring AI’s impact on human wellbeing

A team led by the MIT Media Lab's Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) program, with UC Berkeley Haas, USC Marshall's Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making, and the Psychology of Technology Institute, launched ImpactBench, an open, expert-guided evaluation framework for measuring AI's impact on human wellbeing. The results feed a companion tool called AI Nutrition Labels, which distills benchmark results into a consumer-facing format showing how different models might affect users. UC Berkeley Haas professor Juliana Schroeder, a project collaborator, said the team set out to build "a rigorous, independent measure of how AI shapes human psychology—not just what it outputs, but what it does to our thinking, our autonomy, and our wellbeing.

By Haas News A team of researchers led by the MIT Media Lab’s Advancing Humans with AI AHA https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/aha/overview/ program, in collaboration with UC Berkeley Haas https://haas.berkeley.edu/ , the USC Marshall’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making https://www.marshall.usc.edu/institutes-and-centers/neely-center-for-ethical-leadership-and-decision-making , and the Psychology of Technology Institute, https://www.psychoftech.org/ has launched ImpactBench http://www.mitmedialab.info/useimpactbench , an expert-guided, open, and evolving evaluation framework for measuring AI’s impact on human wellbeing. The findings are translated into a new tool called AI Nutrition Labels https://impactbench.media.mit.edu/nutrition , which distills benchmark results into an accessible format for consumers to better understand how different models might affect them. “We’ve set out to build a rigorous, independent measure of how AI shapes human psychology—not just what it outputs, but what it does to our thinking, our autonomy, and our wellbeing,” says Juliana Schroeder, a professor at UC Berkeley Haas and one of the collaborators on the project. “This is a first step, and we’re asking the field to help us get it right.”