AI Ethics and Governance in Practice: An Introduction

In 2021, the UK's National AI Strategy recommended that UK Government’s official Public Sector Guidance on AI Ethics and Safety be transformed into a series of practice-based workbooks. The result is the AI Ethics and Governance in Practice Programme. This series of eight workbooks provides end-to-end guidance on how to apply principles of AI ethics and safety to the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of AI systems. It provides public sector organisations with a Process Based Governance (PBG) Framework designed to assist AI project teams in ensuring that the AI technologies they build, procure, or use are ethical, safe, and responsible. 

This first workbook provides an introduction to the AI Ethics and Governance in Practice programme and provides an outline of the key components that make up AI systems.

AI systems may have transformative and long-term effects on individuals and society. To manage these impacts responsibly and direct the development of AI systems toward optimal public benefit, considerations of AI ethics and governance must be a first priority. In this workbook, we introduce fundamental concepts of AI, responsible research and innovation, and AI ethics and governance, such as the SSAFE-D Principles – which stands for Sustainability, Safety, Accountability, Fairness, Explainability, and Data-Stewardship. The SSAFE-D Principles are a set of ethical principles that serve as starting points for reflection and deliberation about possible harms and benefits associated with data-driven technologies.

We then go on to describe the PBG Framework, a multi-tiered governance model that enables project teams to integrate ethical values and practical principles into their innovation practices and to have clear mechanisms for demonstrating and documenting this.  

You can download a summary of the workbook below, alongside the full workbook.