Personalized, generative AI systems increasingly adapt their behavior to individual users over time, fundamentally changing model behavior. While existing auditing approaches have been effective at surfacing harms in non-personalized contexts, they often rely on static, simulated evaluations and definitions of harm that aggregate across broad, group categories. In this position paper, we argue that such approaches can fail to capture emergent harms in personalized generative AI systems, where harms surface through interpretations of ongoing interaction and evolve with user history. We identify three presuppositions underlying many harm auditing paradigms: that harms can be (1) specified outside real-world interaction, (2) defined non-pluralistically within groups, and (3) treated as static. One might argue that personalized systems could simply learn definitions of what constitutes harm to individual users through repeated interactions. However, we argue that attempts to surface user harms through deeper personalization risk imposing asymmetric burdens of labor and privacy on marginalized users. Consequently, we propose reframing understandings of harm as adaptive, user- and community-centered processes, and outline design directions that shift auditing from retrospective evaluation toward infrastructures that support ongoing articulation of harm in interaction. Our work highlights the need for auditing and design practices that better reflect the pluralistic and evolving nature of harm understanding in personalized generative AI systems.
Zora Z. Wang, John Yang, Kilian Lieret +10cs.HC cs.AI cs.SE
Recent progress in AI coding agent research has led to rapid improvements in agents' ability to autonomously perform complex software engineering tasks, from editing large codebases to executing long-horizon development workflows. As these systems make strides, however, the primary bottleneck to practical usefulness increasingly shifts away from pure task-solving capability, and toward challenges in how users communicate with, supervise, and trust agents. In this position paper, we argue for a reorientation from autonomous to human-centered coding agents: systems designed not only to complete tasks, but to collaborate effectively with people. We identify four core interaction-level dimensions that characterize the human-agent task-solving loop: task alignment, verifiability, steerability, and adaptability. Finally, we outline concrete research directions to advance these dimensions, including user-involved coding environments, comprehensive verification mechanisms, and principled measures of human-agent interaction quality.