Can human-centered LLM design ever achieve universal solutions?

Even granting that human-centered objectives belong throughout the LLM pipeline, the framework makes an uncomfortable admission: those objectives tend to resist universal solutions. The optimal path depends both on who you ask and on how you operationalize contested concepts like harm and benefit. Broad themes — transparency, privacy, safety, justice — recur across stakeholders, but there is significant variation in how each ideal should be implemented. Governments and non-profits may codify the dominant perspective into law, yet high-level guidelines fail to capture the nuance of real-world use and lag behind the rapid evolution of the models themselves.

This is the open question that pipeline-wide human-centering cannot dissolve by good engineering alone. If "harm" has no operationalization that satisfies every stakeholder, then "embed human values across the pipeline" underdetermines the actual gradient — the developer still has to choose whose values, measured how. The danger the framework flags is that in the face of this irreducible contestation, stakeholders go passive, and passivity simply endorses the status quo, which means whatever the capability-driven defaults already encode. So the operationalization-dependence of harm is not a reason to abandon human-centering but a reason to make the value-choices explicit and revisable rather than implicit and frozen. The unresolved part is procedural: what legitimate process aggregates or arbitrates between divergent operationalizations without collapsing back into majority preference or developer convenience.

— "Reflections and New Directions for Human-Centered Large Language Models", https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06901