How to design an AI ethics board

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive framework for designing AI ethics boards, outlining key design choices and considerations to effectively reduce AI risks within organizations.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed decision-making toolbox for AI companies to design effective ethics boards, addressing challenges and providing practical guidance.

Findings

Identifies five key design choices for AI ethics boards.

Discusses how design choices impact risk reduction effectiveness.

Provides a structured decision-making framework for organizations.

Abstract

Organizations that develop and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) systems need to take measures to reduce the associated risks. In this paper, we examine how AI companies could design an AI ethics board in a way that reduces risks from AI. We identify five high-level design choices: (1) What responsibilities should the board have? (2) What should its legal structure be? (3) Who should sit on the board? (4) How should it make decisions and should its decisions be binding? (5) What resources does it need? We break down each of these questions into more specific sub-questions, list options, and discuss how different design choices affect the board's ability to reduce risks from AI. Several failures have shown that designing an AI ethics board can be challenging. This paper provides a toolbox that can help AI companies to overcome these challenges.