research-article

Open access

Stronger Together: on the Articulation of Ethical Charters, Legal Tools, and Technical Documentation in ML

Authors:

Giada Pistilli,

Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis,

Yacine Jernite,

Margaret MitchellAuthors Info & Claims

FAccT '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

Pages 343 - 354

https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594002

Published: 12 June 2023 Publication History

All formats PDF

Abstract

The growing need for accountability of the people behind AI systems can be addressed by leveraging processes in three fields of study: ethics, law, and computer science. While these fields are often considered in isolation, they rely on complementary notions in their interpretation and implementation. In this work, we detail this interdependence and motivate the necessary role of collaborative governance tools in shaping a positive evolution of AI. We first contrast notions of compliance in the ethical, legal, and technical fields; we outline both their differences and where they complement each other, with a particular focus on the roles of ethical charters, licenses, and technical documentation in these interactions. We then focus on the role of values in articulating the synergies between the fields and outline specific mechanisms of interaction between them in practice. We identify how these mechanisms have played out in several open governance fora: an open collaborative workshop, a responsible licensing initiative, and a proposed regulatory framework. By leveraging complementary notions of compliance in these three domains, we can create a more comprehensive framework for governing AI systems that jointly takes into account their technical capabilities, their impact on society, and how technical specifications can inform relevant regulations. Our analysis thus underlines the necessity of joint consideration of the ethical, legal, and technical in AI ethics frameworks to be used on a larger scale to govern AI systems and how the thinking in each of these areas can inform the others.

Supplemental Material

ZIP File

Appendix

Download
14.25 KB

References

[1]

Giorgio Agamben. 2006. Che cos’è un dispositivo?Nottetempo, Milano.

[2]

Christopher Akiki, Giada Pistilli, Margot Mieskes, Matthias Gallé, Thomas Wolf, Suzana Ili’c, and Yacine Jernite. 2022. BigScience: A Case Study in the Social Construction of a Multilingual Large Language Model. ArXiv abs/2212.04960 (2022).

[3]

James Alm and Benno Torgler. 2011. Do Ethics Matter? Tax Compliance and Morality. Journal of Business Ethics 101, 4 (2011), 635–651.

[4]

Aristotle. 2011. Nicomachean Ethics. University of Chicago Press.

[5]

Emily M. Bender and Batya Friedman. 2018. Data Statements for Natural Language Processing: Toward Mitigating System Bias and Enabling Better Science. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 6 (2018), 587–604. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00041

[6]

BigScience. 2022. BigScience OpenRAIL-M License. https://www.licenses.ai/blog/2022/8/26/bigscience-open-rail-m-license.

[7]

Andrew Bowne and Benjamin McMartin. 2022. Implementing Responsible AI: Proposed Framework for Data Licensing. https://www.gmu.edu/news/2022-04/no-10-implementing-responsible-ai-proposed-framework-data-licensing

[8]

Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru. 2018. Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification. In FAT.

[9]

Alastair V. Campbell (Ed.). 1997. Medical Ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

[10]

Nicholas Carlini, Daphne Ippolito, Matthew Jagielski, Katherine Lee, Florian Tramèr, and Chiyuan Zhang. 2022. Quantifying Memorization Across Neural Language Models. ArXiv abs/2202.07646 (2022).

[11]

Federal Circuit. 2008. Jacobsen v. Katzer, inc.Fed. Cir., F.3d 1373, 1379 pages.

[12]

M. Coeckelbergh. 2020. AI Ethics. MIT Press, United Kingdom.

[13]

Cary Coglianese and Robert A. Kagan. 2007. Regulation and Regulatory Processes. (2007). https://ssrn.com/abstract=1297410 U of Penn Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 08-43.

[14]

European Commission. 2021. Proposal for a Regulation laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence. digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu.

[15]

European Commission. 2021. Report on Artificial Intelligence Liability. eur-lex.europa.eu.

[16]

Concil of EU. 2022. Artificial Intelligence Act: Council calls for promoting safe AI that respects fundamental rights. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022/12/06/artificial-intelligence-act-council-calls-for-promoting-safe-ai-that-respects-fundamental-rights/

[17]

D. Contractor, D. McDuff, J. K. Haines, J. Lee, C. Hines, B. Hecht, 2022. Behavioral use licensing for responsible AI. In 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. 778–788.

Digital Library

[18]

Danish Contractor, Carlos Munos Ferrandis, Jenny Lee, and Daniel McDuff. 2022. From RAIL to Open RAIL: Topologies of RAIL Licenses. https://www.licenses.ai/blog/2022/8/18/naming-convention-of-responsible-ai-licenses

[19]

N. K. Corrêa, C. Galvão, J. W. Santos, C. Del Pino, E. P. Pinto, C. Barbosa, and E. Terem. 2022. Worldwide AI Ethics: a Review of 200 Guidelines and Recommendations for AI Governance. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.11922 (2022). arxiv:2206.11922

[20]

G. Cosmacini. 2013. Il giuramento di Ippocrate. AlboVersorio, Italie.

[21]

Cour de Cassation. 2021. Cour de Cassation Pourvoi n° 21-15.386. Pourvoi n° 21-15.386.

[22]

Gilles Deleuze. 1992. What Is a Dispositif? In Michel Foucault Philosopher, T.J. Armstrong (Ed.). Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 159–168.

[23]

Deborah A. DeMott. 1997. Organizational Incentives to Care About the Law. Law and Contemporary Problems 60 (1997), 39–66.

[24]

John Dewey. 1939. Theory of Valuation. Philosophy of Science 6, 4 (1939), 490–491.

[25]

Jennifer Ding, Christopher Akiki, Yacine Jernite, Annie Steele, and Temi Popo. 2023. Towards Openness Beyond Open Access: User Journeys through 3 Open AI Collaboratives. ArXiv abs/2301.08488 (2023).

[26]

Ronald Dworkin. 1977. Taking Rights Seriously. Duckworth, London.

[27]

Ronald Dworkin. 2011. Justice for Hedgehogs. Harvard University Press.

[28]

Benj Edwards. 2022. Artist finds private medical record photos in popular AI training data set. (2022). https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/artist-finds-private-medical-record-photos-in-popular-ai-training-data-set/.

[29]

Jacques Ellul. 1977. Le Systeme technicien. Cherche Midi, Paris.

[30]

European Commission, Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. 2019. Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2759/346720

[31]

Hugging Face. 2022. BigCode OpenRAIL-M License. https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigcode/bigcode-model-license-agreement.

[32]

Hugging Face. 2022. SIL AI RAIL-M License. https://huggingface.co/spaces/sil-ai/model-license.

[33]

Carlos Munos Ferrandis. 2022. OpenRAIL: Towards open and responsible AI licensing frameworks. https://huggingface.co/blog/open_rail

[34]

L. Floridi. 2018. Soft Ethics and the Governance of the Digital. Philosophy & Technology 31 (2018), 1–8.

[35]

L. Floridi. 2022. Etica dell’intelligenza artificiale: Sviluppi, opportunita, sfide. Cortina Raffaello, Italia.

[36]

European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. [n. d.]. Hard Law Definition. https://www.ecchr.eu/en/glossary/hard-law-soft law/

[37]

Michel Foucault. 1975. Surveiller et punir : naissance de la prison. Vol. 225. Editions Gallimard.

[38]

F. Garelli. 2006. L’Italia cattolica nell’epoca del pluralismo. Il Mulino, Bologna. 1–170 pages.

[39]

Timnit Gebru, Jamie Morgenstern, Briana Vecchione, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Hanna Wallach, Hal Daumé III, and Kate Crawford. 2020. Datasheets for Datasets. arXiv:1803.09010 [cs] (March 2020). arxiv:1803.09010 [cs] http://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09010

[40]

Carol Gilligan. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press, United States. 184 pages.

[41]

Gerardo González-Saldivar, René Rodríguez-Gutiérrez, Jose Luis Viramontes-Madrid, Alejandro Salcido-Montenegro, Neri Alejandro Álvarez-Villalobos, Victoria González-Nava, and José Gerardo González-González. 2019. Participants’ awareness of ethical compliance, safety and protection during participation in pharmaceutical industry clinical trials: a controlled survey. BMC Medical Ethics 20, 1 (2019), 2.

[42]

Jürgen Habermas. 1990. Moral consciousness and communicative action. MIT press.

[43]

Hla Hart. 1961. The Concept of Law. Oxford University Press.

[44]

E. Hine and L. Floridi. 2022. Artificial Intelligence with American Values and Chinese Characteristics: A Comparative Analysis of American and Chinese Governmental AI Policies. SSRN (2022). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4006332

[45]

O. Samuel Idowu, Capaldi Capaldi, Zu Liangrong, and Ananda Das Gupta. 2013. Encyclopedia of Corporate Social Responsibility. Springer.

[46]

David Isles. 1978. Artificial Intelligence as a Possible Tool for Discovering Laws of Logic. Cognitive Science 2, 4 (1978), 329–360.

[47]

Till Jaeger. 2010. Enforcement of the GNU GPL in Germany and Europe. Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law (JIPITEC) 1 (2010), 35.

[48]

Yacine Jernite, Suzana Ilić, Giada Pistilli, Sasha Luccioni, and Margaret Mitchell. 2023. Social Context of LLMs – the BigScience Approach, Part 1: Overview of the Governance, Ethics, and Legal Work. https://montrealethics.ai/social-context-of-llms-the-bigscience-approach-part-1-%EF%BF%BCoverview-of-the-governance-ethics-and-legal-work/ [Online; accessed 31-January-2023].

[49]

Yacine Jernite, Giada Pistilli, Mathilde Bras, and Carlos Munos Ferrandis. 2022. BigScience : « Il faut promouvoir l’innovation ouverte et bienveillante pour mettre le respect de la vie privée au cœur de la recherche en IA ». https://linc.cnil.fr/fr/bigscience-il-faut-promouvoir-linnovation-ouverte-et-bienveillante-pour-mettre-le-respect-de-la-vie

[50]

Hans Joas. 2008. The Cultural Values of Europe: An Introduction. In The Cultural Values of Europe, Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt (Eds.). Liverpool University Press, Liverpool.

[51]

Aviva Jobin, Jean-Francois Bonnefon, Azim Shariff, Shane Anderson, Patrick Brecke, Cynthia Breazeal, Virginia Eubanks, Christian Fieseler, Rachel Friedberg, Paul Kahn, and et al.2019. The Global Landscape of AI Ethics Guidelines. Nat Mach Intell 1 (2019), 389–399.

[52]

A. J. I. Jones, A. Artikis, and J. Pitt. 2013. The design of intelligent socio-technical systems. Artificial Intelligence Review 39 (jun 2013), 5–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-012-9387-2

[53]

Vlad Krotov and Leiser Silva. 2018. Legality and ethics of web scraping. (2018).

[54]

Hugo Laurencon, Lucile Saulnier, Thomas Wang, Christopher Akiki, Albert Villanova del Moral, Teven Le Scao, Leandro von Werra, Chenghao Mou, Eduardo Gonzalez Ponferrada, Huu Nguyen, Jorg Frohberg, Mario Sasko, Quentin Lhoest, Angelina Mcmillan-Major, Gerard Dupont, Stella Biderman, Anna Rogers, Loubna Ben Allal, Francesco de Toni, Giada Pistilli, Olivier Nguyen, Somaieh Nikpoor, Maraim Masoud, Pierre Colombo, Javier de la Rosa, Paulo Villegas, Tristan Thrush, Shayne Longpre, Sebastian Nagel, Leon Weber, Manuel Romero Munoz, Jian Zhu, Daniel van Strien, Zaid Alyafeai, Khalid Almubarak, Vu Minh Chien, Itziar Gonzalez-Dios, Aitor Soroa, Kyle Lo, Manan Dey, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Aaron Gokaslan, Shamik Bose, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Long Phan, Hieu Tran, Ian Yu, Suhas Pai, Jenny Chim, Violette Lepercq, Suzana Ili’c, Margaret Mitchell, Sasha Luccioni, and Yacine Jernite. 2022. The BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset. In Thirty-sixth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks Track. New Orleans, United States. https://hal.science/hal-03823922

[55]

Marie McKendall, Beverly DeMarr, and Catherine Jones-Rikkers. 2002. Ethical compliance programs and corporate illegality: Testing the assumptions of the corporate sentencing guidelines. Journal of Business Ethics 37, 4 (2002), 367–383.

[56]

Steven H. Miles. 2004. The Hippocratic Oath and the Ethics of Medicine. Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.

[57]

M. Mitchell, S. Wu, A. Zaldivar, P. Barnes, L. Vasserman, B. Hutchinson, 2019. Model Cards for Model Reporting. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. 220–229.

Digital Library

[58]

Margaret Mitchell, Simone Wu, Andrew Zaldivar, Parker Barnes, Lucy Vasserman, Ben Hutchinson, Elena Spitzer, Inioluwa Deborah Raji, and Timnit Gebru. 2019. Model Cards for Model Reporting. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency(FAT* ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 220–229. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287596

Digital Library

[59]

Christopher Moran. 2021. Machine Learning, Ethics, and Open Source Licensing (Part II/II). https://thegradient.pub/machine-learning-ethics-and-open-source-licensing-2/

[60]

L. Munn. 2022. The Uselessness of AI Ethics. AI Ethics (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-022-00209-w

[61]

Munich District Court (Landgericht München). 2004. Welte v. Sitecom Deutschland GmbH. Case No. 21 O 6123/04.

[62]

Paris Court of Appeal. 2021. Entre’Ouvert v Orange & Orange Business Services. Pôle 5 Ch. 2, nº19/17493.

[63]

Central District of California. 2022. Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. vs Vizio, Inc.Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. v. Vizio, Inc. (8:21-cv-01943-JLS-KES, C.D. Cal.).

[64]

Parliament of Canada. [n. d.]. An Act to enact the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts. https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/44-1/c-27

[65]

U.S. Copyright Office. 2022. Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17) and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/

[66]

The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. 2017. Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. https://ethicsinaction.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/ead1e.pdf Version 1.

[67]

European Parliament. [n. d.]. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation). http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj. OJ L 119, 4.5.2016, p. 1-88.

[68]

European Parliament. 2020. Resolution of 20 October 2020 with Recommendations to the Commission on a Framework of Ethical Aspects of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Related Technologies. 2020/2012(INL).

[69]

I. D. Raji, A. Smart, R. N. White, M. Mitchell, T. Gebru, B. Hutchinson, ..., and P. Barnes. 2020. Closing the AI accountability gap: Defining an end-to-end framework for internal algorithmic auditing. In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency. 33–44.

[70]

Toke Ronnow-Rasmussen. 2015. Intrinsic and extrinsic value. In The Oxford handbook of value theory. Oxford University Press, 29–43.

[71]

Teven Le Scao, Angela Fan, Christopher Akiki, et. al. 2022. BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model. ArXiv abs/2211.05100 (2022).

[72]

Shawn Shan, Jenna Cryan, Emily Wenger, Haitao Zheng, Rana Hanocka, and Ben Y. Zhao. 2023. GLAZE: Protecting Artists from Style Mimicry by Text-to-Image Models. ArXiv abs/2302.04222 (2023).

[73]

A.L. Strauss. 1969. Social Psychology and Human Values (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315129730

[74]

Henk Ten Have (Ed.). 2018. Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05544-2

[75]

Joan C. Tronto. 1993. Moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge, New York.

[76]

UNESCO. 2021. AI Ethics in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Programme and Meeting Document.

[77]

I. Van de Poel. 2016. An Ethical Framework for Evaluating Experimental Technology. Science and Engineering Ethics 22 (2016).

[78]

I. van de Poel. 2020. Embedding Values in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Systems. Minds and Machines 30 (2020), 385–409. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-020-09537-4

Digital Library

[79]

Priya Walia. 2023. Researchers discover AI models generate photos of real people and copyrighted images. TechSpot (2023). https://www.techspot.com/news/97499-researchers-discover-ai-models-generate-photos-real-people.html.

[80]

M. Weber. 2004. The vocation lectures. Hackett Publishing.

[81]

Angeli Weller. 2020. Exploring Practitioners’ Meaning of "Ethics," "Compliance," and "Corporate Social Responsibility" Practices: A Communities of Practice Perspective. Business and Society 59, 3 (2020), 518–544.

[82]

David Gray Widder, Dawn Nafus, Laura Dabbish, and James Herbsleb. 2022. Limits and Possibilities for “Ethical AI” in Open Source: A Study of Deepfakes. In 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2035–2046. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533779

Digital Library

Cited By

Toney ACurlee KProbasco E(2024)Trust Issues: Discrepancies in Trustworthy AI Keywords Use in Policy and ResearchProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3630106.3659035(2222-2233)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3630106.3659035
Kommiya Mothilal RGuha SAhmed S(2024)Towards a Non-Ideal Methodological Framework for Responsible MLProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642501(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642501
Corrêa NSantos JGalvão CPasetti MSchiavon DNaqvi FHossain ROliveira N(2024)Crossing the principle–practice gap in AI ethics with ethical problem-solvingAI and Ethics10.1007/s43681-024-00469-8Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-024-00469-8
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Stronger Together: on the Articulation of Ethical Charters, Legal Tools, and Technical Documentation in ML
1. Social and professional topics

Recommendations

The Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: In Search of Enaction, at Risk of Inaction
Abstract
The US is promoting a new vision of a “Good AI Society” through its recent AI Bill of Rights. This offers a promising vision of community-oriented equity unique amongst peer countries. However, it leaves the door open for potential rights ...
Ethical responsibilities and legal liabilities of network security professionals
ACSAC '97: Proceedings of the 13th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

Profits, losses and the attendant risks of tort litigation run to the extreme in times of great speculation in an unregulated economic environment-conditions which characterize the present enormous growth in computer networking. Public law enforcement ...
(A)I Am Not a Lawyer, But...: Engaging Legal Experts towards Responsible LLM Policies for Legal Advice
FAccT '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of providing users with advice in a wide range of professional domains, including legal advice. However, relying on LLMs for legal queries raises concerns due to the significant expertise required and ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

FAccT '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

June 2023

1929 pages

ISBN:9798400701924

DOI:10.1145/3593013

Copyright © 2023 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 June 2023

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

FAccT '23

FAccT '23: the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

June 12 - 15, 2023

IL, Chicago, USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
1,517
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)1,016
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)91

Reflects downloads up to 24 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Toney ACurlee KProbasco E(2024)Trust Issues: Discrepancies in Trustworthy AI Keywords Use in Policy and ResearchProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3630106.3659035(2222-2233)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3630106.3659035
Kommiya Mothilal RGuha SAhmed S(2024)Towards a Non-Ideal Methodological Framework for Responsible MLProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642501(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642501
Corrêa NSantos JGalvão CPasetti MSchiavon DNaqvi FHossain ROliveira N(2024)Crossing the principle–practice gap in AI ethics with ethical problem-solvingAI and Ethics10.1007/s43681-024-00469-8Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-024-00469-8
Golpayegani DHupont IPanigutti CPandit HSchade SO’Sullivan DLewis D(2024)AI Cards: Towards an Applied Framework for Machine-Readable AI and Risk Documentation Inspired by the EU AI ActPrivacy Technologies and Policy10.1007/978-3-031-68024-3_3(48-72)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-68024-3_3

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents