Everything you ever wanted to know? Probably not.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01167

Trustworthy AI: From Principles to Practices

Fast developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology has enabled various applied systems deployed in the real world, impacting people's everyday lives. However, many current AI systems were found vulnerable to imperceptible attacks, biased against underrepresented groups, lacking in user privacy protection, etc., which not only degrades user experience but erodes the society's trust in all AI systems. In this review, we strive to provide AI practitioners a comprehensive guide towards building trustworthy AI systems. We first introduce the theoretical framework of important aspects of AI trustworthiness, including robustness, generalization, explainability, transparency, reproducibility, fairness, privacy preservation, alignment with human values, and accountability. We then survey leading approaches in these aspects in the industry. To unify the current fragmented approaches towards trustworthy AI, we propose a systematic approach that considers the entire lifecycle of AI systems, ranging from data acquisition to model development, to development and deployment, finally to continuous monitoring and governance. In this framework, we offer concrete action items to practitioners and societal stakeholders (e.g., researchers and regulators) to improve AI trustworthiness. Finally, we identify key opportunities and challenges in the future development of trustworthy AI systems, where we identify the need for paradigm shift towards comprehensive trustworthy AI systems.

“I know it when I see it” is not a very good basis for ethical debates.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401221001262

Ethical framework for Artificial Intelligence and Digital technologies

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Digital technologies (DT) is proliferating a profound socio-technical transformation. Governments and AI scholarship have endorsed key AI principles but lack direction at the implementation level. Through a systematic literature review of 59 papers, this paper contributes to the critical debate on the ethical use of AI in DTs beyond high-level AI principles. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that identifies 14 digital ethics implications for the use of AI in seven DT archetypes using a novel ontological framework (physical, cognitive, information, and governance). The paper presents key findings of the review and a conceptual model with twelve propositions highlighting the impact of digital ethics implications on societal impact, as moderated by DT archetypes and mediated by organisational impact. The implications of intelligibility, accountability, fairness, and autonomy (under the cognitive domain), and privacy (under the information domain) are the most widely discussed in our sample. Furthermore, ethical implications related to the governance domain are shown to be generally applicable for most DT archetypes. Implications under the physical domain are less prominent when it comes to AI diffusion with one exception (safety). The key findings and resulting conceptual model have academic and professional implications.

My AI says this question is not going away.

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/can-computer-systems-using-artificial-intelligence-patent-their-own-inventions

Can Computer Systems Using Artificial Intelligence Patent their Own Inventions?

… Thus far two patent offices, i.e., the South African and Australian patent offices, have determined an AI may properly be an inventor. After the Australian patent office rejected Thaler’s application, the AU Federal Court reversed the decision stating the Commissioner’s interpretation of an inventor had been “too narrowly applied” because in his view an inventor can be “anything that invents.” Meanwhile, this question is still pending in India, Israel and South Korea. The challenge in these cases is the juggling of the “responsibilities” of the traditional “inventor,” such as its power to assign or alienate in general as compared to the modern day reality that AI systems may invent in ways not contemplated by the humans who created these systems. Not surprisingly, these issues have led to the question of whether current patent laws need revising to provide patent protection for inventions by AI. This will be an interesting area of the law to watch as countries grapple with what patent protections, if any, are available for inventions and other works created solely by AI systems.

(Related)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3936654

Protecting Sentient AI: A Survey of Lay Intuitions on Standing, Personhood, and General Legal Protection of Sentient Artificial Intelligence

To what extent, if any, should the law protect sentient artificial intelligence (that is, AI that can feel pleasure or pain)? Here we surveyed United States adults (n=1061) on their views regarding granting (a) general legal protection, (b) legal personhood, and (c) standing to bring forth a lawsuit, with respect to sentient AI and eight other groups: humans in the jurisdiction, humans outside the jurisdiction, corporations, unions, non-human animals, the environment, humans living in the near future, and humans living in the far future. Roughly one-third of participants endorsed granting personhood and standing to sentient AI (assuming its existence) in at least some cases, the lowest of any group surveyed on, and rated the desired level of protection for sentient AI as lower than all groups other than corporations. We further investigated and observed political differences in responses; liberals were more likely to endorse legal protection and personhood for sentient AI than conservatives. Taken together, these results suggest that laypeople are not by-and-large in favor of granting legal protection to AI, and that the ordinary conception of legal status, similar to codified legal doctrine, is not based on a mere capacity to feel pleasure and pain. At the same time, the observed political differences suggest that previous literature regarding political differences in empathy and moral circle expansion apply to artificially intelligent systems and extend partially, though not entirely, to legal consideration, as well.

Use AI or else?

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-16-4621-8_2

Utilizing Artificial Intelligence in Legal Practice

The authors investigate the experience of using artificial intelligence (AI) in law firms’ activities globally. During the research, it was revealed that: (1) Legal Tech is a branch of business specializing in information technology services for professional legal activities and providing consumers with legal services using information technologies; (2) there is no single list of Legal Tech; lawyers, theorists, and practitioners present Legal Tech classifications based on various criteria; (3) according to the authors of this monograph, currently the primary technologies are (a) “predict courts’ decisions” or “prediction technology” and (b) “predictive coding”; (4) the recognized advantage of using AI tools in legal practice is efficiency-increasing capacity. The future of AI technology will give legal practitioners a competitive edge in litigation, enabling them to serve their clients better. Law firms that use AI will be more in demand, and firms unable to automate their activities may lose clients due to higher prices for the same services.

(Related)

https://kulawr.msal.ru/jour/article/view/135

The Revolutionary Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Future of the Legal Profession

Two decades into the 21st Century, it is abundantly clear that Artificial Intelligence technology will fundamentally change the legal system as well as the economics of our daily lives. During the early years of AI development, computers successfully surpassed humans only in complex games requiring exceptional intelligence (e.g., chess, Go, Shogi). The legal profession assumed that AI would be unable to master the nuances and ambiguities of language and the skills required of first class lawyers. The recent history of AI advancement proved that assumption wrong. When combined with the new focus of neuroscientists and related disciplines on the study of the human brain, AI stands on the threshold of exceeding human intelligence in the areas which have historically been the exclusive domain of the legal profession. There is currently a broad array of important tools in the AI field which lawyers may use to improve efficiency and profitability, These AI tools are just the beginning. We can also anticipate that AI will necessarily and substantially affect decisions traditionally relegated to the autonomy of individual citizenry as well, with dramatic consequences. This paper attempts to identify the implications of AI technology on the legal profession, the broader society in which it operates, and the challenges confronted by the next generation of lawyers and law students.