C

CAIDP Statement to the

US Office of Science and Technology Policy

regarding

the AI Bill of Rights 

May 18, 2022

 

 

May 18, 2022

 

Director Dr. Alondra Nelson

Office of Science and Technology Policy

Washington, DC

 

Dear Dr. Nelson,

 

We are writing to you regarding the need to move forward the proposal for a Bill of Rights for the Age of Artificial Intelligence. As you wrote last year, "“In the United States, some of the failings of AI may be unintentional, but they are serious and they disproportionately affect already marginalized individuals and communities. They often result from AI developers not using appropriate data sets and not auditing systems comprehensively, as well as not having diverse perspectives around the table to anticipate and fix problems before products are used . . .”

 

You recently described the AI Bill of Rights as a top priority and indicated that your office would release the final document in the next few weeks. We support this initiative and we are optimistic that the Office of Science and Technology Policy will set out a framework  that is concrete, meaningful, and builds on established AI policy frameworks, such as the OECD AI Principles and the Universal Guidelines for AI (UGAI). 

 

The Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP) strongly supports AI policies that advance democratic values and promote broad social inclusion based on fundamental rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law. We write now to share our expectations for the forthcoming AI Bill of Rights. The AI Bill of Rights will be vitally important to help counter bias and protect fundamental rights in the design and deployment of AI-based systems in in the United States. We urge you to establish a Bill of Rights that sets out concrete principles, avoids qualifiers, builds on prior AI initiatives, and is bipartisan. 

 

A good model is the Universal Guidelines for AI (UGAI), the first human rights framework for AI. The UGAI set out basic rights and obligations for the use of AI that could serve as a helpful guide for the AI Bill of Rights. More than 300 experts and 60 organizations, including leading scientific and computing societies in the United States such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, endorsed the Universal Guidelines for AI. The UGAI included fairness, accountability, transparency, and human determination principles. Obligations included standards for accuracy, security, and public safety and prohibitions on practices such as secret profiling and social credit scores, which enable government surveillance and discrimination.

 

The United States has also made important commitments about AI and democratic values. In the 2019 Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in AI, the United States said it would “foster public trust and confidence in AI technologies and protect civil liberties, privacy, and American values in their application[.]” That same year, the United States endorsed  the OECD AI Principles, which established a national commitment to inclusive growth, sustainable development, human-centered values, fairness, transparency, explainability, security, safety, and accountability. In 2020, the Department of Defense adopted ethical AI principles requiring AI systems to be responsible, equitable, traceable, reliable, and governable. And in 2021, the United States joined with other G-7 nations to promote “robust transparency” to counter the impact of algorithmic bias.

 

In your article last year, you outlined several key elements for the AI Bill of Rights:

• Your right to know when and how AI is influencing a decision that affects your civil rights and civil liberties;
• Your freedom from being subjected to AI that hasn’t been carefully audited to ensure that it’s accurate, unbiased, and has been trained on sufficiently representative data sets;
• Your freedom from pervasive or discriminatory surveillance and monitoring in your home, community, and workplace; and
• Your right to meaningful recourse if the use of an algorithm harms you. 

You also outlined several strategies to implement these rights:

• The federal government could refuse to buy software or technology products that fail to respect these rights;
• Federal contractors could be required to use technologies that adhere to this “bill of rights,” and
• New laws and regulations could be adopted.

We also appreciate your public outreach for this initiative.

 

Thank you for you consideration of our views. We look forward to the release of the AI Bill of Rights.We welcome to opportunity to discuss the initiative further.

 

 

[Preliminary endorsements. More names are being added]

 

Merve Hickok, Chair, CAIDP; Founder AI Ethicist

Marc Rotenberg, President, CAIDP

Karine Caunes, Global Program Director, CAIDP

Dr. Pablo Molina

Cristos Velasco, CAIDP Outreach Board Member.

Larissa Zutter, CAIDP Board Member

Doaa Abu Elyounes, UNESCO Bioethics and Ethics of Science Section, Ecole Normale Superieur ENS Paris

Dr. Lorraine Kisselburgh, Inaugural Chair, ACM Technology Policy Council

Prof. Ben Shneiderman, UMD Department of Comuter Science; author, Human Centered AI (Oxford 2022)

Prof. Moshe Vardi, Rice University

Somaieh Nikpoor

Eddan Katz

Rachel Stockton

Prof. Kevin Lee, Intel Social Justice and Racial Equity Professor of Law, North Carolina Central University School of Law

Roberto Lopez-Davila

Sharvari Dhote

Cecilia Garibotti

Dr. Grace Thomson

Joel Kumwenda

Prof. L Jean Camp, Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing

Tamra Moore

August Gweon

Mark Hahn

Prof. James Hendler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Prof. Eugene H. Spafford, Purdue University

Dr. Monica Lopez, Cognitive Insights for Artificial Intelligence

Giuliano Borter, CAIDP

Anirban Sen

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, EAI, Northestaern Universtiy

Preethika Pilinja

Prof. Markus Krebsz

Jessica Seamands

Irana Buzu, Council of Europe

Amelia McGowan

Victoria Blackham

Laurie Burgess

 

 

(Affiliations are for identification only)

 

 

[Endorsements for the statement may be sent to admin@caidp.org]

 

 

[Preliminary endorsements. More organizations are being added]

• Coalición de Derechos Humanos
• Common Defense
• Defending Rights and Dissent
• Equal Justice Society
• Fix Democracy First
• Government Accountability Project (GAP)
• Government Information Watch
• William E. Morris Institute for Justice
• National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
• Organic Consumers Association
• Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
• Restore the Fourth
• SMART Elections