A Remote Participatory Workshop on Digital Wellbeing and Artificial Intelligence with Middle School Girls

The recent rapid rise of AI raises pressing questions about its impact on Digital Wellbeing, especially among teenagers who already grapple with challenges related to tech-life balance. Teenagers are confronting a complex sociotechnical landscape; therefore, anticipating the potential influence of AI, especially on social media, is imperative. In this paper, we describe the outcome of a remote participatory design workshop with 33 adolescent girls from across the United States. They redesigned prevalent social media algorithms with a focus on enhancing wellbeing. Through near-peer mentoring in age-based small groups, participants followed an ethical design framework to evaluate stakeholders, and re-imagine novel algorithms. Our findings highlight the importance of values such as relaxation, personalization, safety, and education for novel algorithms. Furthermore, we observed that participants not only critically examined the impact of invisible algorithms as social media users but also transitioned into empowered creators of novel algorithms through this virtual synchronous workshop.