Closing the AI Accountability Gap: Defining an End-to-End Framework for Internal Algorithmic Auditing

TL;DR

This paper introduces an end-to-end internal auditing framework for AI systems, aiming to enhance accountability and traceability throughout the development lifecycle to address societal concerns and prevent harm.

Contribution

It presents a novel comprehensive framework for internal AI system auditing, integrating organizational values and principles to improve accountability and traceability.

Findings

Framework supports AI development lifecycle from start to deployment.

Audit reports are generated at each stage to ensure accountability.

Framework aims to close the accountability gap in AI development.

Abstract

Rising concern for the societal implications of artificial intelligence systems has inspired a wave of academic and journalistic literature in which deployed systems are audited for harm by investigators from outside the organizations deploying the algorithms. However, it remains challenging for practitioners to identify the harmful repercussions of their own systems prior to deployment, and, once deployed, emergent issues can become difficult or impossible to trace back to their source. In this paper, we introduce a framework for algorithmic auditing that supports artificial intelligence system development end-to-end, to be applied throughout the internal organization development lifecycle. Each stage of the audit yields a set of documents that together form an overall audit report, drawing on an organization's values or principles to assess the fit of decisions made throughout the process. The proposed auditing framework is intended to contribute to closing the accountability gap in the development and deployment of large-scale artificial intelligence systems by embedding a robust process to ensure audit integrity.