How can artificial intelligence (AI) earn, and rebuild, our trust over time? This is what a recent study published in AI and Ethics hopes to address as a pair of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) investigated the challenges of integrating AI into our everyday lives. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, legislators, and the public better understand AI’s role in our everyday lives and address shortcomings before they become too burdensome.
For the study, the researchers examined numerous concerns that AI poses through its integration, including privacy, ethics, fairness, algorithmic bias, and technological deployment. The team accomplished this through a literature review discussing the legal, ethical, and social ramifications of AI-human integration. The goal of the study was to ascertain how a line can be drawn regarding AI trustworthiness while still supporting future research and development.
In the end, the researchers concluded that guardrails and mechanisms should be in place to monitor AI trustworthiness and lessen the burden of human users. They note this comes with enabling human users to use AI while providing feedback on improvements. This involves five key areas, including knowing the users, transparency, context, simplicity, and adaptability when trust is lost.
“Our understanding of trust is really different from one person to the next,” said Dr. Amir Behzadan, who is a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at CU Boulder and lead author of the study. “Even if you have a very trustworthy system or person, our reaction to that system or person can be very different. You may trust them, and I may not.”
This study comes as AI is rapidly becoming integrated into our everyday lives, including social media, driving, healthcare, research, law enforcement, and more. Therefore, studies like this can help establish guardrails and protocols for protecting the trustworthiness of AI and improve the human-machine interface.
What new discoveries regarding AI’s trustworthiness will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: AI and Ethics, EurekAlert!
