Abstract: Human feedback is often the "gold standard" for AI alignment, but what if this "gold" reflects diverse, even contradictory human values? This keynote explores the technical and ethical challenges of building beneficial AI when values conflict -- not just between individuals, but also within them. My talk advocates for a dual expansion of the AI alignment framework: moving beyond a single, monolithic viewpoint to a plurality of perspectives, and transcending narrow safety and engagement metrics to promote comprehensive human well-being.
Verena Rieser is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where she founded the VOICES team (Voices-of-all in alignment). Her team’s mission is to enhance Gemini’s safety and usability for diverse communities. Verena has pioneered work in data-driven multimodal Dialogue Systems and Natural Language Generation, encompassing conversational RL agents, faithful data-to-text generation, spoken language understanding, evaluation methodologies, and applications of AI for societal good. Verena previously directed the NLP lab as a full professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and held a Royal Society Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship. She earned her PhD from Saarland University.
