AI Ethics and Governance in Practice

Introduction

In 2019, the Public Policy Programme, in collaboration with the UK’s Office for Artificial Intelligence and the Government Digital Service, published the UK Government’s official Public Sector Guidance on AI Ethics and Safety. This document provides public sector organisations with the Process-Based-Governance (PBG) Framework, a framework for applying principles of AI ethics and safety to the design, development, and deployment of algorithmic systems.

In 2021, the UK's National AI Strategy recommended that the 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, alongside an interactive online platform, provides end-to-end guidance on how AI project teams can put ethical values and practical principles into practice across the AI project lifecycle, ensuring that AI is produced and used ethically, safely, and responsibly. Central to this guidance is the PBG Framework, designed to assist AI project teams in ensuring that the AI technologies they build, procure, or use are ethical, safe, and responsible.

Project aims

The project is primarily aimed at civil servants engaging in the AI Ethics and Governance in Practice programme as either AI Ethics Champions delivering the curriculum within their organisations by facilitating peer-learning workshops, or participants completing the programme by attending workshops. These have been designed to serve as stand-alone, open access resources.

The goal of the workshops is to support robust organisational understanding of the Public Sector Guidance and to promote cumulative cultural transformation, skills enlargement, and ethically sound practices throughout the AI research and innovation lifecycle.

Applications

The AI Ethics and Governance in Practice Programme curriculum is composed of a series of eight workbooks, which can also be explored as modules within the online platform.

Each workbook/module in the series covers how to implement a key component of the PBG Framework. These include sustainability, fairness, technical safety, accountability, explainability, and data stewardship. Each also focuses on a specific domain, so that case studies can be used to promote ethical reflection and animate the key concepts.

The workbooks are intended to provide public sector bodies with the skills required for putting AI ethics and governance principles into practice through the full implementation of the guidance. To this end, they contain activities with instructions for either facilitating or participating in capacity-building workshops.

This project was supported by UKRI and The Alan Turing Institute.