Designing Fiduciary Artificial Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper proposes a comprehensive procedure for designing and auditing Fiduciary AI systems that ensure legal and ethical compliance by understanding context, identifying principals, and aligning with trustworthiness principles.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework combining legal and computer science insights to guide the development of AI systems that fulfill fiduciary duties.

Findings

Fiduciary AI aligns with principles of trustworthiness like privacy and alignment.

The procedure helps address data consent issues in complex systems.

Provides a structured approach for legal and ethical compliance in AI design.

Abstract

A fiduciary is a trusted agent that has the legal duty to act with loyalty and care towards a principal that employs them. When fiduciary organizations interact with users through a digital interface, or otherwise automate their operations with artificial intelligence, they will need to design these AI systems to be compliant with their duties. This article synthesizes recent work in computer science and law to develop a procedure for designing and auditing Fiduciary AI. The designer of a Fiduciary AI should understand the context of the system, identify its principals, and assess the best interests of those principals. Then the designer must be loyal with respect to those interests, and careful in an contextually appropriate way. We connect the steps in this procedure to dimensions of Trustworthy AI, such as privacy and alignment. Fiduciary AI is a promising means to address the incompleteness of data subject's consent when interacting with complex technical systems.