What is Safety? Corporate Discourse, Power, and the Politics of Generative AI Safety

TL;DR

This paper critically analyzes how AI companies' safety discourses serve to legitimize corporate authority and normalize safety practices, urging scholars to scrutinize these narratives for accountability and justice.

Contribution

It introduces a critical discourse analysis of corporate safety statements, highlighting how safety is used to reinforce power and urging HCI scholars to challenge these framings.

Findings

Corporate safety discourses legitimize authority and responsibility.

Safety is normalized as an experimental, anticipatory practice.

Uncritical acceptance may reinforce corporate priorities and limit governance options.

Abstract

This work examines how leading generative artificial intelligence companies construct and communicate the concept of "safety" through public-facing documents. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, we analyze a corpus of corporate safety-related statements to explicate how authority, responsibility, and legitimacy are discursively established. These discursive strategies consolidate legitimacy for corporate actors, normalize safety as an experimental and anticipatory practice, and push a perceived participatory agenda toward safe technologies. We argue that uncritical uptake of these discourses risks reproducing corporate priorities and constraining alternative approaches to governance and design. The contribution of this work is twofold: first, to situate safety as a sociotechnical discourse that warrants critical examination; second, to caution human-computer interaction scholars against legitimizing corporate framings, instead foregrounding accountability, equity, and justice. By interrogating safety discourses as artifacts of power, this paper advances a critical agenda for human-computer interaction scholarship on artificial intelligence.