Fairness Issues in AI Systems that Augment Sensory Abilities
It highlights critical fairness problems for disabled users in AI-augmented sensory technologies, identifying specific ethical and practical issues.
The paper addresses unique AI fairness challenges in systems that augment sensory abilities for disabled users, such as accessibility issues with data and models, ethical decisions on conveyed information, and privacy concerns.
Systems that augment sensory abilities are increasingly employing AI and machine learning (ML) approaches, with applications ranging from object recognition and scene description tools for blind users to sound awareness tools for d/Deaf users. However, unlike many other AI-enabled technologies, these systems provide information that is already available to non-disabled people. In this paper, we discuss unique AI fairness challenges that arise in this context, including accessibility issues with data and models, ethical implications in deciding what sensory information to convey to the user, and privacy concerns both for the primary user and for others.