Intel community releases framework for ethically using artificial intelligence

The U.S. intelligence community released artificial intelligence principles and an ethics framework on Thursday to ensure that intel organizations are safely and legally developing AI systems as the technology quickly evolves. The long-awaited principles and framework, released in two separate documents by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, are meant to outline the intelligence community's broad values and guidance for the ethical development of AI. The accompanying six-page framework, with 10 stated objectives, is meant to put "meat on the bones" of the stated principles, Ben Huebner, chief of ODNI's Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency, said Thursday on a call with reporters. Huebner said there are a series of questions that practitioners within the 17 intelligence agencies should consider when developing AI. It's a tool, and it's a tool that provides the intelligence community with a consistent approach" to artificial intelligence, Huebner said. The intelligence community is a massive conglomerate of agencies, each tasked with a specific intelligence mission, making it difficult to verify the implementation of these ethics considerations. To ease oversight challenges, a critical piece of the framework calls on AI users in the intel community to adequately document information about the AI technology under development. That would include explanations on the AI's intended use, its design, its limitations, related data sets and changes to its algorithm over time. Asked how ODNI will verify that AI projects at intelligence agencies under its purview are following the framework and principles, Huebner pointed to the documentation guidance that could then be accessible by legal counsels, inspectors general, and privacy and civil liberties officers. By giving us your email, you are opting in to the C4ISRNET Daily Brief. "One of the things I think you see throughout particularly the ethics framework is the incorporation of best practices to allow the folks [in] the oversight community ... the tools they'll need to conduct that oversight," Huebner said. The framework is just the first iteration of ODNI's ethics framework. Huebner told reporters to expect further iterations of the framework as the intel community learns more about the use cases for AI, and as the technology itself matures. Dean Souleles, who runs ODNI's Augmenting Intelligence through Machines Innovation Hub, told reporters that within ODNI's working groups, they are "actively" developing different standards for future use cases. "It is too early to define a long list of dos and don'ts," Souleles said. "We need to understand how this technology works.