Social Work Practice and AI: Reverence, Resistance and Reflection

Artificial intelligence (AI)’s impact on social work is shaped not only by the technology, but by the questions the profession asks about it. Currently, these questions are fractured across ideological positions: some focus enthusiastically on how AI can inform practice (reverence), others on whether AI is fundamentally incompatible with social work values (resistance), and still others on what governance and ethical frameworks might guide adoption (reflection). Each line of inquiry raises important concerns, but they rarely intersect, leaving the profession without a coherent agenda for rigorous inquiry into AI’s role in social work. This roundtable examines the questions each camp has prioritized, identifies critical gaps in the current discourse, and engages participants in collectively formulating the questions social work must ask to ensure AI is developed and deployed in ways that centers clients and communities, while upholding social work values.

We will explore these three ideological camps shaping the AI in social work discourse. First, the reverent, who take a techno-positivist stance, centering their rhetoric on efficiency; asking how AI can streamline administrative tasks, improve risk assessment accuracy, and expand capacity to serve growing populations with constrained resources. Their focus leans toward adoption as a desired goal, emphasizing generative AI’s accessibility, as these tools require no technical expertise, lower barriers to entry, and empower practitioners to leverage technology without specialized training. Second, the resistant, who argue that AI cannot replicate the embodied, relational, and reflexive dimensions central to social work's identity. Recent legislation in states including Illinois and California reflects this group’s advocacy for guardrails against AI providing therapy or making autonomous decisions affecting vulnerable populations. Third, the reflective, who reject both techno-utopianism and techno-dystopianism, asking instead what values-guided frameworks should govern AI design and deployment in social work services.

These three groups exist in genuine tension. This ideological fracture is not incidental but reflects authentic disagreements about whether AI can be deployed within social work's ethical codes and values, or whether certain applications are categorically incompatible with the profession's fundamental commitments. This roundtable brings together scholars and practitioners across these orientations to collectively examine the questions each has prioritized and, critically, the questions that remain underexplored. Panelists will briefly present how each orientation frames AI’s role in social work and what lines of inquiry it prioritizes.

Panelists and participants will then engage in structured dialogue to identify gaps, tensions, and overlaps, surfacing assumptions that have gone unexamined and questions the profession has not yet posed. The goal is not to resolve these differences but to collaboratively generate a more comprehensive research agenda that moves beyond siloed inquiry toward the integrated, rigorous questioning needed to assess both AI’s genuine benefits and its risks to the populations social work serves.

Each of these camps represents a coherent ethical and philosophical stance. Productive engagement requires recognizing these positions as distinct ethical orientations while creating space for reflective dialogue across them, so that decisions about AI in social work are shaped not only by adoption or refusal, but by sustained, values-grounded inquiry.