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 ethics principle


Congratulations to the #AIES2025 best paper award winners!

AIHub

The eighth AAAI / ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) is currently taking place in Madrid, Spain, running from 20-22 October. During the opening ceremony, the best papers for this year were announced. While it is well-known that AI systems might bring about unfair social impacts by influencing social schemas, much attention has been paid to instances where the content presented by AI systems explicitly demeans marginalized groups or reinforces problematic stereotypes. This paper urges critical scrutiny to be paid to instances that shape social schemas through subtler manners. Drawing from recent philosophical discussions on the politics of artifacts, we argue that many existing AI systems should be identified as what Liao and Huebner called oppressive things when they function to manifest oppressive normality.


Measuring What Matters: Connecting AI Ethics Evaluations to System Attributes, Hazards, and Harms

Rismani, Shalaleh, Shelby, Renee, Davis, Leah, Rostamzadeh, Negar, Moon, AJung

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Over the past decade, an ecosystem of measures has emerged to evaluate the social and ethical implications of AI systems, largely shaped by high-level ethics principles. These measures are developed and used in fragmented ways, without adequate attention to how they are situated in AI systems. In this paper, we examine how existing measures used in the computing literature map to AI system components, attributes, hazards, and harms. Our analysis draws on a scoping review resulting in nearly 800 measures corresponding to 11 AI ethics principles. We find that most measures focus on four principles - fairness, transparency, privacy, and trust - and primarily assess model or output system components. Few measures account for interactions across system elements, and only a narrow set of hazards is typically considered for each harm type. Many measures are disconnected from where harm is experienced and lack guidance for setting meaningful thresholds. These patterns reveal how current evaluation practices remain fragmented, measuring in pieces rather than capturing how harms emerge across systems. Framing measures with respect to system attributes, hazards, and harms can strengthen regulatory oversight, support actionable practices in industry, and ground future research in systems-level understanding.


Leveraging LLMs for User Stories in AI Systems: UStAI Dataset

Yamani, Asma, Baslyman, Malak, Ahmed, Moataz

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI systems are gaining widespread adoption across various sectors and domains. Creating high-quality AI system requirements is crucial for aligning the AI system with business goals and consumer values and for social responsibility. However, with the uncertain nature of AI systems and the heavy reliance on sensitive data, more research is needed to address the elicitation and analysis of AI systems requirements. With the proprietary nature of many AI systems, there is a lack of open-source requirements artifacts and technical requirements documents for AI systems, limiting broader research and investigation. With Large Language Models (LLMs) emerging as a promising alternative to human-generated text, this paper investigates the potential use of LLMs to generate user stories for AI systems based on abstracts from scholarly papers. We conducted an empirical evaluation using three LLMs and generated $1260$ user stories from $42$ abstracts from $26$ domains. We assess their quality using the Quality User Story (QUS) framework. Moreover, we identify relevant non-functional requirements (NFRs) and ethical principles. Our analysis demonstrates that the investigated LLMs can generate user stories inspired by the needs of various stakeholders, offering a promising approach for generating user stories for research purposes and for aiding in the early requirements elicitation phase of AI systems. We have compiled and curated a collection of stories generated by various LLMs into a dataset (UStAI), which is now publicly available for use.


Challenges and Best Practices in Corporate AI Governance:Lessons from the Biopharmaceutical Industry

Mökander, Jakob, Sheth, Margi, Gersbro-Sundler, Mimmi, Blomgren, Peder, Floridi, Luciano

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While the use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems promises to bring significant economic and social benefits, it is also coupled with ethical, legal, and technical challenges. Business leaders thus face the question of how to best reap the benefits of automation whilst managing the associated risks. As a first step, many companies have committed themselves to various sets of ethics principles aimed at guiding the design and use of AI systems. So far so good. But how can well-intentioned ethical principles be translated into effective practice? And what challenges await companies that attempt to operationalize AI governance? In this article, we address these questions by drawing on our first-hand experience of shaping and driving the roll-out of AI governance within AstraZeneca, a biopharmaceutical company. The examples we discuss highlight challenges that any organization attempting to operationalize AI governance will have to face. These include questions concerning how to define the material scope of AI governance, how to harmonize standards across decentralized organizations, and how to measure the impact of specific AI governance initiatives. By showcasing how AstraZeneca managed these operational questions, we hope to provide project managers, CIOs, AI practitioners, and data privacy officers responsible for designing and implementing AI governance frameworks within other organizations with generalizable best practices. In essence, companies seeking to operationalize AI governance are encouraged to build on existing policies and governance structures, use pragmatic and action-oriented terminology, focus on risk management in development and procurement, and empower employees through continuous education and change management.


Resolving Ethics Trade-offs in Implementing Responsible AI

Sanderson, Conrad, Schleiger, Emma, Douglas, David, Kuhnert, Petra, Lu, Qinghua

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While the operationalisation of high-level AI ethics principles into practical AI/ML systems has made progress, there is still a theory-practice gap in managing tensions between the underlying AI ethics aspects. We cover five approaches for addressing the tensions via trade-offs, ranging from rudimentary to complex. The approaches differ in the types of considered context, scope, methods for measuring contexts, and degree of justification. None of the approaches is likely to be appropriate for all organisations, systems, or applications. To address this, we propose a framework which consists of: (i) proactive identification of tensions, (ii) prioritisation and weighting of ethics aspects, (iii) justification and documentation of trade-off decisions. The proposed framework aims to facilitate the implementation of well-rounded AI/ML systems that are appropriate for potential regulatory requirements.


Who to Trust, How and Why: Untangling AI Ethics Principles, Trustworthiness and Trust

Duenser, Andreas, Douglas, David M.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present an overview of the literature on trust in AI and AI trustworthiness and argue for the need to distinguish these concepts more clearly and to gather more empirically evidence on what contributes to people s trusting behaviours. We discuss that trust in AI involves not only reliance on the system itself, but also trust in the developers of the AI system. AI ethics principles such as explainability and transparency are often assumed to promote user trust, but empirical evidence of how such features actually affect how users perceive the system s trustworthiness is not as abundance or not that clear. AI systems should be recognised as socio-technical systems, where the people involved in designing, developing, deploying, and using the system are as important as the system for determining whether it is trustworthy. Without recognising these nuances, trust in AI and trustworthy AI risk becoming nebulous terms for any desirable feature for AI systems.


Implementing Responsible AI: Tensions and Trade-Offs Between Ethics Aspects

Sanderson, Conrad, Douglas, David, Lu, Qinghua

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Many sets of ethics principles for responsible AI have been proposed to allay concerns about misuse and abuse of AI/ML systems. The underlying aspects of such sets of principles include privacy, accuracy, fairness, robustness, explainability, and transparency. However, there are potential tensions between these aspects that pose difficulties for AI/ML developers seeking to follow these principles. For example, increasing the accuracy of an AI/ML system may reduce its explainability. As part of the ongoing effort to operationalise the principles into practice, in this work we compile and discuss a catalogue of 10 notable tensions, trade-offs and other interactions between the underlying aspects. We primarily focus on two-sided interactions, drawing on support spread across a diverse literature. This catalogue can be helpful in raising awareness of the possible interactions between aspects of ethics principles, as well as facilitating well-supported judgements by the designers and developers of AI/ML systems.


Operationalizing Responsible AI at Scale: CSIRO Data61's Pattern-Oriented Responsible AI Engineering Approach

Communications of the ACM

For the world to realize the benefits brought by AI, it is important to ensure artificial intelligent (AI) systems are responsibly developed, used throughout their entire life cycle, and trusted by the humans expected to rely on them.1 The goal for AI adoption has triggered a significant national effort to realize responsible AI (RAI) in Australia. CSIRO Data61 is the data and digital specialist arm of Australia's national science agency. In 2019, CSIRO Data61's worked with the Australian government to conduct the AI Ethics Framework research. This work led to the release of eight AI ethics principles to ensure Australia's adoption of AI is safe, secure, and reliable.a It is challenging to turn high-level AI ethics principles into real-life practices.


Kingdom of Saudi Arabia develop AI ethics principles

#artificialintelligence

RIYADH:- The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proudly announces its AI Ethics Principles for public consultation. They were designed by the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) to be a practical guide to incorporating AI ethics throughout the AI system development life cycle. AI Ethics principles recognize the importance of developing artificial intelligence and technology innovation into the Kingdom's services for its citizens and visitors. After analyzing global and domestic standards and guidelines for AI use, SDAIA has developed an operational framework that entities can use to promote AI while limiting the technology's irresponsible use. AI ethics will provide a common ground or standards to help the Kingdom avoid or reduce technology limitations.


Focus on the Process: Formulating AI Ethics Principles More Responsibly

#artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been involved in numerous scandals in recent years. For instance, take the COMPAS recidivism algorithm. The algorithm evaluated the likelihood that defendants will commit another crime in the future. It was widely used in the US criminal justice system to inform decisions about who can be set free at all stages of the process. In 2016, ProPublica exposed that COMPAS's predictions were biased: its mistakes favored white over black defendants. Black defendants were twice as likely to be labeled as high risk to reoffend but not actually reoffend.