Overview

Overview 

This report was written by the staff of the Partnership on AI (PAI) and many of our Partner organizations, with particularly  input from the members of PAI’s Fairness, Transparency, and Accountability Working Group. Our work on this topic was initially prompted by California’s Senate Bill 10 (S.B. 10), which would mandate the purchase and use of statistical and machine learning risk assessment tools for pretrial detention decisions, but our work has subsequently expanded to assess the use of such software across the United States.

Though this document incorporated suggestions or direct authorship from around 30-40 of our partner organizations, it should not under any circumstances be read as representing the views of any specific member of the Partnership. Instead, it is an attempt to report the widely held views of the artificial intelligence research community as a whole.

The Partnership on AI is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization established to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society.

The Partnership’s activities are determined in collaboration with its coalition of over 80 members, including civil society groups, corporate developers and users of AI, and numerous academic artificial intelligence research labs. PAI aims to create a space for open conversation, the development of best practices, and coordination of technical research to ensure that AI is used for the benefit of humanity and society. Crucially, the Partnership is an independent organization; though supported and shaped by our Partner community, the Partnership is ultimately more than the sum of its parts and makes independent determinations to which its Partners collectively contribute, but never individually dictate. PAI provides administrative and project management support to Working Groups, oversees project selection, and provides financial resources or direct research support to projects as needs dictate.

The Partnership on AI is deeply grateful for the collaboration of so many colleagues in this endeavor and looks forward to further convening and undertaking the multi-stakeholder research needed to build best practices for the use of AI in this critical domain.