Main Insight
In a paper published at the International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Assistance for Legal Professionals in the Digital Workplace (Legal AIIA), Dr. Bruce Hedin and Samuel Curtis present an argument for distributed competence as a means to mitigate risks posed by AI systems.
Strengthening the AI operating environment
June 21, 2023
In a new paper titled “Strengthening the AI Operating Environment: Distributed competence as a means to risk mitigation,” published at the 3rd International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Assistance for Legal Professionals in the Digital Workplace (LegalAIIA 2023), Dr. Bruce Hedin and Samuel Curtis present an argument for distributed competence as a means to mitigate risks attendant upon the use of AI systems.
The authors observe that initial efforts to contain the risks posed by AI systems have been, overall, top-down in nature. Examples of these include constraints on the design of AI-enabled applications, industry best practices, and legal statutes that govern AI applications and their creators. The authors posit that bottom-up approaches focused on strengthening the environment in which AI is deployed are a necessary complement to these top-down, application-focused approaches.
The paper presents two bottom-up initiatives aimed at enhancing the human component of AI deployment:
- Through better information – The creation of an ongoing institutionalized program of interoperable, open AI benchmarks to supply the empirical evidence needed to foster a public empowered to make informed decisions about the use of AI.
- Through better tools – The creation of a repository of resources for local validation to provide empirical grounds for determining whether an AI system was successful in its specific circumstances.
The paper furthermore presents an overview of the work completed toward both of these initiatives to date, in collaboration with the IEEE and, in the case of the benchmarking initiative, with the Working Group on Interoperable Benchmarking of AI Systems. More information on these initiatives will be publicly available later this year.
Dr. Bruce Hedin presented the paper at the 3rd International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Assistance for Legal Professionals in the Digital Workplace (LegalAIIA 2023), which was co-located with the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2023), in Braga, Portugal on June 19th, 2023. More publications from the workshop can be found here.
