A First Look at AI Trends in Value-Aligned Software Engineering Publications: Human-LLM Insights

Recent criticism of social media platforms by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for neglecting child safety exemplifies how software can undermine human values. This is further complicated by the growing integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in software, which introduces inherent challenges such as biases and limited transparency. However, AI also presents opportunities to embed human values into software. To explore these opportunities, we have utilized the reasoning abilities of ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM), in combination with human expertise, to study the use of AI in publications that address human values, across some of the leading software engineering (SE) venues from 2022 to 2023. Our findings confirm the use of AI concepts - mainly General Machine Learning - in around 33 % of these valuealigned publications. The value alignments largely concern pragmatic aspects of Achievement and (personal) Security, while the majority of the values receive less attention. The socially focused values of Conformity and Tradition and the personally focused value of Hedonism are rarely addressed in the SE publications.