A new voluntary framework for designing artificial intelligence products ethically has been revealed by a global consortium of AI experts and data scientists.
There are 25,000 members of the World Ethical Data Foundation, including employees of several digital behemoths including Meta, Google, and Samsung.
The framework includes a list of 84 issues that programmers should think about before beginning an AI project.
The foundation is also encouraging the general public to submit their own inquiries.It states that all of them will be taken into account at its upcoming annual meeting.
The framework was published as an open letter, which appears to be the favoured approach among AI experts. It has multiple signatories.
The Foundation, which was established in 2018, is a non-profit global organisation that brings together experts working in technology and academia to examine the development of new technologies.
Its issues for developers include how to avoid an AI product from integrating prejudice and how to cope with a circumstance in which a tool's output leads to law-breaking.
Yvette Cooper, the Labour Party's shadow home secretary, stated this week that people who intentionally utilise AI techniques for terrorist goals will face criminal charges.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has appointed tech entrepreneur and AI investor Ian Hogarth to oversee an AI taskforce. Mr. Hogarth said this week that he wants "to better understand the risks associated with these frontier AI systems" and hold the firms that develop them accountable.
Other factors considered in the framework include data protection legislation in different countries, whether it is obvious to a user that they are engaging with AI, and whether human workers who input or tag data required to train the product were treated fairly.
The complete list is broken down into three chapters: questions for individual developers, questions for a team to think about collectively, and questions for those who will be testing the product.
"We're in this Wild West stage, where it's just kind of: 'Chuck it out in the open and see how it goes'." Vince Lynch, the company's creator and a board advisor for the World Ethical Data Foundation, said. The concept for the framework was his.
"And now those cracks that are in the foundations are becoming more apparent, as people are having conversations about intellectual property, how human rights are considered in relation to AI and what they're doing."
It's not possible to simply remove data that is copyright protected from a model that has already been trained; instead, the model may need to be built from scratch.
"That can cost hundreds of millions of dollars sometimes. It is incredibly expensive to get it wrong," Mr Lynch added.
Series of letters
As the AI industry grapples with concerns related to its rapid growth in the lack of public or governmental control, open letters have recently begun to dominate the industry.
Some of the most prominent figures in technology, including Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Stability AI creator Emad Mostaque, signed an open letter in March calling for a pause on AI development for at least six months to allow for research and risk mitigation related to the technology.
In May, a similar petition urging action to reduce "the risk of extinction from AI" appeared, this time with signatories such as AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.