Principled Artificial Intelligence: Mapping Consensus in Ethical and Rights-Based Approaches to Principles for AI

By Jessica Fjeld, N.B. Achten, Hannah Hilligoss, Ádám Nagy, M. Srikumar. 2020

776 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The rapid spread of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has precipitated a rise in ethical and human rights-based frameworks intended to guide the development and use of these technologies. Despite the proliferation of these "AI principles," there has been little scholarly focus on understanding these efforts either individually or as contextualized within an expanding universe of principles with discernible trends. To that end, this white paper and its associated data visualization compare the contents of thirty-six prominent AI principles documents side-by-side. This effort uncovered a growing consensus around eight key thematic trends: privacy, accountability, safety and security, transparency and explainability, fairness and non-discrimination, human control of technology, professional responsibility, and promotion of human values. Underlying this “normative core,” our analysis examined the forty-seven individual principles that make up the themes, detailing notable similarities and differences in interpretation found across the documents. In sharing these observations, it is our hope that policymakers, advocates, scholars, and others working to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of AI will be better positioned to build on existing efforts and to push the fractured, global conversation on the future of AI toward consensus.

Subfields: Safety Research, AI Ethics, Fairness & Society, Philosophy

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Citations in the corpus

Data Governance in the Age of Large-Scale Data-Driven Language Technology (2022, background): “[55] Jessica Fjeld, Nele Achten, Hannah Hilligoss, Adam Nagy, and Madhulika Srikumar.”
Accountability in artificial intelligence: what it is and how it works (2023, background): “Generally speaking, accountability in AI relates to the expectation that designers, developers, and deployers will comply with standards and legislation to ensure the proper functioning of AIs during their life cycle (Fjeld et al., 2020).”
Human-Centered AI (2021, background): “In line with the Department of Defense (DoD) Ethical Principles for Artificial Intelligence [1], [14] and other sets of technical ethics [15] , humans must have the ultimate responsibility for decisions and outcomes.”
Education for AI, not AI for Education: The Role of Education and Ethics in National AI Policy Strategies (2021, background): “…derived from a review of six high-profile initiatives, bears substantial similarities with other scholarly efforts to AI create ethics typologies (Fjeld et al. 2020; Jobin et al. 2019; Zeng et al. 2018), and is highly familiar given its overlap with traditional bioethics principles (Beauchamp…”
Bridging the Gap Between Ethics and Practice (2020, background): “The HCAI movement has raised these issues again with frequent calls for Algo-rithmic Accountability and Transparency [40], Ethically Aligned Design [56], and Professional Responsibility [36].”
Confronting Abusive Language Online: A Survey from the Ethical and Human Rights Perspective (2020, background): “The principle of the promotion of human values is largely congruous with fundamental human rights, and includes the following three main concerns: supporting and promoting human values and human flourishing, benefiting society, and ensuring broad access to technology (Fjeld et al., 2020).”
How safe is our reliance on AI, and should we regulate it? (2020, background): “This is why it was soon derided in a letter signed by 156 experts on AI, ethics, and law [31].”
Generative Adversarial Networks–Enabled Human–Artificial Intelligence Collaborative Applications for Creative and Design Industries: A Systematic Review of Current Approaches and Trends (2021, background): “Finally, there is the ethical perspective (Whittle, 2019; Fjeld et al., 2020).”
The ethics of ChatGPT - Exploring the ethical issues of an emerging technology (2024, background): “It has a strong emphasis on ethical guidelines and principles (Fjeld et al., 2020; Jobin et al., 2019) which includes a number of high profile interventions (AI HLEG, 2019) but it also legislation such as the EU ’ s AI Act (European Commission, 2021), various approaches to standardisation (IEEE,…”