Exploring the impact of broader impact requirements for AI governance

As machine learning algorithms and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools become increasingly widespread, some governments and institutions have started introducing regulations aimed at ensuring that they are ethically designed and implemented. Last year, for instance, the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference introduced a new ethics-related requirement for all authors submitting AI-related research. Researchers at University of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI, the department of Computer Science and the Future of Humanity Institute have recently published a perspective paper that discusses the possible impact and implications of requirements such as the one introduced by the NeurIPS conference. This paper, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, also recommends a series of measures that may maximize these requirements' chance of success. "Last year, NeurIPS introduced a requirement that submitting authors include a broader impact statement in their papers," Carina E. Prunkl, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.