Designing Fiduciary Artificial Intelligence
This addresses the issue of incomplete user consent in complex technical systems for legal and organizational contexts, though it is incremental as it synthesizes existing work.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring AI systems used by fiduciary organizations comply with legal duties of loyalty and care, by developing a procedure for designing and auditing Fiduciary AI that connects to dimensions like privacy and alignment.
A fiduciary is a trusted agent that has the legal duty to act with loyalty and care towards a principal that employs them. When fiduciary organizations interact with users through a digital interface, or otherwise automate their operations with artificial intelligence, they will need to design these AI systems to be compliant with their duties. This article synthesizes recent work in computer science and law to develop a procedure for designing and auditing Fiduciary AI. The designer of a Fiduciary AI should understand the context of the system, identify its principals, and assess the best interests of those principals. Then the designer must be loyal with respect to those interests, and careful in an contextually appropriate way. We connect the steps in this procedure to dimensions of Trustworthy AI, such as privacy and alignment. Fiduciary AI is a promising means to address the incompleteness of data subject's consent when interacting with complex technical systems.