Hazel Weakly, Nivenly Foundation; Sandeep Kanabar, Gen
AI is often said to be a "garbage in, garbage out" solution. So what happens when you take a carefully tuned system and try to operate it with AI?
Chaos! Bedlam! Or maybe... not?
AI assistance has some studied drawbacks: data poisoning, bias, inaccessibility, de-skilling, and more. We could very well end up in a world that is run by inaccessible and inscrutable black box AI systems. But! The situation isn't hopeless!
AI seems to be here to stay, but the drawbacks don't have to be. Join Hazel and Sandeep as we take you on a journey through our personal experiences with biased and broken systems, how we've worked around them, and strategies we have for addressing these issues as well as preventing future ones. Together, we'll discover how to transform AI into a transparent and reliable tool that helps enable innovation rather than chaos.
Hazel spends her days working on building out teams of humans as well as the infrastructure, systems, automation, and tooling to make life better for others. She’s worked at a variety of companies, across a wide range of tech, and knows that the hardest problems to solve are the social ones. Hazel currently serves as a Director on the board of the Haskell Foundation, as a Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation, and is fondly known as the Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm (a popular Mastodon instance). One of her favorite things is watching someone light up when they understand something for the first time, and a life goal of hers is to help as many people as possible experience that joy. She also loves shooting pool and going swing dancing, both as a leader and a follower.
Hailing from India, Sandeep is a passionate software engineer working at Gen (formerly NortonLifeLock). A frequent meetup speaker, Sandeep enjoys sharing his lessons learned from 15+ years in the tech space with the community. He's a staunch advocate for diversity and inclusion and an active member of a tech-focused Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group. Despite facing sensorineural hearing loss since age 14, Sandeep successfully navigates the tech world, relying on lip-reading and captioning.
author = {Hazel Weakly and Sandeep Kanabar},
title = {Systems Thinking with Poisoned Systems},
year = {2025},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}