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The Sanction of Authority: Promoting Public Trust in AI

Published: 01 March 2021 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Trusted AI literature to date has focused on the trust needs of users who knowingly interact with discrete AIs. Conspicuously absent from the literature is a rigorous treatment of public trust in AI. We argue that public distrust of AI originates from the underdevelopment of a regulatory ecosystem that would guarantee the trustworthiness of the AIs that pervade society. Drawing from structuration theory and literature on institutional trust, we offer a model of public trust in AI that differs starkly from models driving Trusted AI efforts. This model provides a theoretical scaffolding for Trusted AI research which underscores the need to develop nothing less than a comprehensive and visibly functioning regulatory ecosystem. We elaborate the pivotal role of externally auditable AI documentation within this model and the work to be done to ensure it is effective, and outline a number of actions that would promote public trust in AI. We discuss how existing efforts to develop AI documentation within organizations---both to inform potential adopters of AI components and support the deliberations of risk and ethics review boards---is necessary but insufficient assurance of the trustworthiness of AI. We argue that being accountable to the public in ways that earn their trust, through elaborating rules for AI and developing resources for enforcing these rules, is what will ultimately make AI trustworthy enough to be woven into the fabric of our society.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
    March 2021
    899 pages
    ISBN:9781450383097
    DOI:10.1145/3442188
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 01 March 2021

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    Author Tags

    1. Trust
    2. artificial intelligence
    3. face-work
    4. institutional trust
    5. structuration theory
    6. trustworthiness

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    • (2024)Embodied Machine LearningProceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3623509.3633370(1-12)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2024
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