  There has been a surge in the number and type of AI tools being tested and
deployed within both national and local government in the UK, including within
the social care sector. Given the many ongoing and planned future developments,
the time is ripe to review and reflect on the state of AI in social care. We do
so by conducting semi-structured interviews with UK-based social work
professionals about their experiences and opinions of past and current AI
systems. Our aim is to understand what systems would practitioners like to see
developed and how. We find that all our interviewees had overwhelmingly
negative past experiences of technology in social care, unanimous aversion to
algorithmic decision systems in particular, but also strong interest in AI
applications that could allow them to spend less time on administrative tasks.
In response to our findings, we offer a series of concrete recommendations,
which include commitment to participatory design, as well as the necessity of
regaining practitioner trust.
