Safe and Ethical AI (SEA) Platform Network · Linking Artificial Intelligence Principles (LAIP)

Responsible Deployment

Principle: The capacity of an AI agent to act autonomously, and to adapt its behavior over time without human direction, calls for significant safety checks before deployment, and ongoing monitoring. Recommendations: Humans must be in control: Any autonomous system must allow for a human to interrupt an activity or shutdown the system (an “off switch”). There may also be a need to incorporate human checks on new decision making strategies in AI system design, especially where the risk to human life and safety is great. Make safety a priority: Any deployment of an autonomous system should be extensively tested beforehand to ensure the AI agent’s safe interaction with its environment (digital or physical) and that it functions as intended. Autonomous systems should be monitored while in operation, and updated or corrected as needed. Privacy is key: AI systems must be data responsible. They should use only what they need and delete it when it is no longer needed (“data minimization”). They should encrypt data in transit and at rest, and restrict access to authorized persons (“access control”). AI systems should only collect, use, share and store data in accordance with privacy and personal data laws and best practices. Think before you act: Careful thought should be given to the instructions and data provided to AI systems. AI systems should not be trained with data that is biased, inaccurate, incomplete or misleading. If they are connected, they must be secured: AI systems that are connected to the Internet should be secured not only for their protection, but also to protect the Internet from malfunctioning or malware infected AI systems that could become the next generation of botnets. High standards of device, system and network security should be applied. Responsible disclosure: Security researchers acting in good faith should be able to responsibly test the security of AI systems without fear of prosecution or other legal action. At the same time, researchers and others who discover security vulnerabilities or other design flaws should responsibly disclose their findings to those who are in the best position to fix the problem.

Principle: Guiding Principles and Recommendations, Apr 18, 2017

Published by Internet Society, "Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Policy Paper"

Related Principles

II. Technical robustness and safety

Trustworthy AI requires algorithms to be secure, reliable and robust enough to deal with errors or inconsistencies during all life cycle phases of the AI system, and to adequately cope with erroneous outcomes. AI systems need to be reliable, secure enough to be resilient against both overt attacks and more subtle attempts to manipulate data or algorithms themselves, and they must ensure a fall back plan in case of problems. Their decisions must be accurate, or at least correctly reflect their level of accuracy, and their outcomes should be reproducible. In addition, AI systems should integrate safety and security by design mechanisms to ensure that they are verifiably safe at every step, taking at heart the physical and mental safety of all concerned. This includes the minimisation and where possible the reversibility of unintended consequences or errors in the system’s operation. Processes to clarify and assess potential risks associated with the use of AI systems, across various application areas, should be put in place.

Published by European Commission in Key requirements for trustworthy AI, Apr 8, 2019

III. Privacy and Data Governance

Privacy and data protection must be guaranteed at all stages of the AI system’s life cycle. Digital records of human behaviour may allow AI systems to infer not only individuals’ preferences, age and gender but also their sexual orientation, religious or political views. To allow individuals to trust the data processing, it must be ensured that they have full control over their own data, and that data concerning them will not be used to harm or discriminate against them. In addition to safeguarding privacy and personal data, requirements must be fulfilled to ensure high quality AI systems. The quality of the data sets used is paramount to the performance of AI systems. When data is gathered, it may reflect socially constructed biases, or contain inaccuracies, errors and mistakes. This needs to be addressed prior to training an AI system with any given data set. In addition, the integrity of the data must be ensured. Processes and data sets used must be tested and documented at each step such as planning, training, testing and deployment. This should also apply to AI systems that were not developed in house but acquired elsewhere. Finally, the access to data must be adequately governed and controlled.

Published by European Commission in Key requirements for trustworthy AI, Apr 8, 2019

· 8. Robustness

Trustworthy AI requires that algorithms are secure, reliable as well as robust enough to deal with errors or inconsistencies during the design, development, execution, deployment and use phase of the AI system, and to adequately cope with erroneous outcomes. Reliability & Reproducibility. Trustworthiness requires that the accuracy of results can be confirmed and reproduced by independent evaluation. However, the complexity, non determinism and opacity of many AI systems, together with sensitivity to training model building conditions, can make it difficult to reproduce results. Currently there is an increased awareness within the AI research community that reproducibility is a critical requirement in the field. Reproducibility is essential to guarantee that results are consistent across different situations, computational frameworks and input data. The lack of reproducibility can lead to unintended discrimination in AI decisions. Accuracy. Accuracy pertains to an AI’s confidence and ability to correctly classify information into the correct categories, or its ability to make correct predictions, recommendations, or decisions based on data or models. An explicit and well formed development and evaluation process can support, mitigate and correct unintended risks. Resilience to Attack. AI systems, like all software systems, can include vulnerabilities that can allow them to be exploited by adversaries. Hacking is an important case of intentional harm, by which the system will purposefully follow a different course of action than its original purpose. If an AI system is attacked, the data as well as system behaviour can be changed, leading the system to make different decisions, or causing the system to shut down altogether. Systems and or data can also become corrupted, by malicious intention or by exposure to unexpected situations. Poor governance, by which it becomes possible to intentionally or unintentionally tamper with the data, or grant access to the algorithms to unauthorised entities, can also result in discrimination, erroneous decisions, or even physical harm. Fall back plan. A secure AI has safeguards that enable a fall back plan in case of problems with the AI system. In some cases this can mean that the AI system switches from statistical to rule based procedure, in other cases it means that the system asks for a human operator before continuing the action.

Published by The European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence in Draft Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, Dec 18, 2018

1 Protect autonomy

Adoption of AI can lead to situations in which decision making could be or is in fact transferred to machines. The principle of autonomy requires that any extension of machine autonomy not undermine human autonomy. In the context of health care, this means that humans should remain in full control of health care systems and medical decisions. AI systems should be designed demonstrably and systematically to conform to the principles and human rights with which they cohere; more specifically, they should be designed to assist humans, whether they be medical providers or patients, in making informed decisions. Human oversight may depend on the risks associated with an AI system but should always be meaningful and should thus include effective, transparent monitoring of human values and moral considerations. In practice, this could include deciding whether to use an AI system for a particular health care decision, to vary the level of human discretion and decision making and to develop AI technologies that can rank decisions when appropriate (as opposed to a single decision). These practicescan ensure a clinician can override decisions made by AI systems and that machine autonomy can be restricted and made “intrinsically reversible”. Respect for autonomy also entails the related duties to protect privacy and confidentiality and to ensure informed, valid consent by adopting appropriate legal frameworks for data protection. These should be fully supported and enforced by governments and respected by companies and their system designers, programmers, database creators and others. AI technologies should not be used for experimentation or manipulation of humans in a health care system without valid informed consent. The use of machine learning algorithms in diagnosis, prognosis and treatment plans should be incorporated into the process for informed and valid consent. Essential services should not be circumscribed or denied if an individual withholds consent and that additional incentives or inducements should not be offered by either a government or private parties to individuals who do provide consent. Data protection laws are one means of safeguarding individual rights and place obligations on data controllers and data processors. Such laws are necessary to protect privacy and the confidentiality of patient data and to establish patients’ control over their data. Construed broadly, data protection laws should also make it easy for people to access their own health data and to move or share those data as they like. Because machine learning requires large amounts of data – big data – these laws are increasingly important.

Published by World Health Organization (WHO) in Key ethical principles for use of artificial intelligence for health, Jun 28, 2021

4 Foster responsibility and accountability

Humans require clear, transparent specification of the tasks that systems can perform and the conditions under which they can achieve the desired level of performance; this helps to ensure that health care providers can use an AI technology responsibly. Although AI technologies perform specific tasks, it is the responsibility of human stakeholders to ensure that they can perform those tasks and that they are used under appropriate conditions. Responsibility can be assured by application of “human warranty”, which implies evaluation by patients and clinicians in the development and deployment of AI technologies. In human warranty, regulatory principles are applied upstream and downstream of the algorithm by establishing points of human supervision. The critical points of supervision are identified by discussions among professionals, patients and designers. The goal is to ensure that the algorithm remains on a machine learning development path that is medically effective, can be interrogated and is ethically responsible; it involves active partnership with patients and the public, such as meaningful public consultation and debate (101). Ultimately, such work should be validated by regulatory agencies or other supervisory authorities. When something does go wrong in application of an AI technology, there should be accountability. Appropriate mechanisms should be adopted to ensure questioning by and redress for individuals and groups adversely affected by algorithmically informed decisions. This should include access to prompt, effective remedies and redress from governments and companies that deploy AI technologies for health care. Redress should include compensation, rehabilitation, restitution, sanctions where necessary and a guarantee of non repetition. The use of AI technologies in medicine requires attribution of responsibility within complex systems in which responsibility is distributed among numerous agents. When medical decisions by AI technologies harm individuals, responsibility and accountability processes should clearly identify the relative roles of manufacturers and clinical users in the harm. This is an evolving challenge and remains unsettled in the laws of most countries. Institutions have not only legal liability but also a duty to assume responsibility for decisions made by the algorithms they use, even if it is not feasible to explain in detail how the algorithms produce their results. To avoid diffusion of responsibility, in which “everybody’s problem becomes nobody’s responsibility”, a faultless responsibility model (“collective responsibility”), in which all the agents involved in the development and deployment of an AI technology are held responsible, can encourage all actors to act with integrity and minimize harm. In such a model, the actual intentions of each agent (or actor) or their ability to control an outcome are not considered.