AI Ethics
By Dr. Elizabeth M. Adams.
As more and more businesses adopt artificial intelligence (AI) to help solve a wide variety of business solutions, the question of developing responsible guidelines becomes even more urgent. In June 2020, Juniper Networks surveyed 700 people across different titles and industries to gauge their organizations’ sentiment and adoption levels of AI. According to their report, 27% of company leaders say they’re looking to deploy fully enabled AI use cases with widespread adoption. However, only 9% surveyed currently consider the governance and policy around their organization’s AI deployment fully mature. Per the report, without proper governance comes the potential for irresponsibly developed AI, which could result in security breaches, and unethical or biased AI, to name a few possible risks.
At StoryFile, our values are centered around trust, authenticity, and innovation. As a company pioneering an AI-driven technology platform, we understand that AI and similarly powerful technologies cannot be built with responsible innovation as an afterthought. Ethics are an integral part of the company by design. These values need to be reflected in company policy, how we operationalize our technology development process, and in the output of the technology we are building. We are committed to making AI more human. StoryFile’s AI principles promote our company values in our continuous design, development, and deployment of AI in our storytelling products and services.
AI Principles
We are committed to ensuring the following AI principles are embedded in our daily business practice. These AI principles will evolve as the field of AI and its applications mature:
- Fairness & Bias – StoryFile will strive to maintain a human-centric approach and will aim to design, develop, and deploy AI storytelling products and services that treat all people equally, fairly, and with respect.
- Trust & Transparency – StoryFile will implement solutions intended to make the use of AI in our products and services accessible and understandable to all.
- Accountability – StoryFile will maintain accountability measures for the proper and ethical functioning of our AI storytelling products and services.
- Social Benefit – StoryFile aims to design, develop, and deploy AI storytelling products and services that use the power of AI responsibly and empower people to tell their own stories in their own words.
- Privacy & Security – StoryFile will prioritize safety, security, and privacy throughout the innovation, design, development, and deployment of our AI storytelling products and services in alignment with our privacy statement and terms of use.
- Authenticity – StoryFile will work to fight misinformation and disinformation by adding a layer of verifiable trust to all types of AI technology and digital content.
Establishing AI Ethics
We ask each of our employees to acknowledge these principles and use them as a guide when performing their daily responsibilities. We strive to foster an environment where our employees can recognize and attend to these considerations in their work. For example, we are establishing an AI ethics committee to assess the company’s compliance with these principles. The committee will ensure that all use cases for our AI technology also align with these principles. The committee will be responsible for setting quarterly OKRs that serve as guideposts and opportunities for healthy discourse, debate, and critique.
We believe these principles and their application are the proper foundation for our company and our future research and development of AI. We acknowledge that this space is dynamic and evolving. Our goal is to approach all that we do with humility and a willingness to adapt our approach as we learn.
