AI Sustainability in Practice Part One: Foundations for Sustainable AI Projects
It addresses the need for sustainable AI projects by offering practical guidance for teams to manage social and ethical impacts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks for responsible innovation.
The paper introduces a workbook that provides concepts and tools for implementing AI Sustainability, focusing on assessing societal impacts and ethical permissibility using SUM Values and facilitating stakeholder engagement through a Stakeholder Engagement Process.
Sustainable AI projects are continuously responsive to the transformative effects as well as short-, medium-, and long-term impacts on individuals and society that the design, development, and deployment of AI technologies may have. Projects, which centre AI Sustainability, ensure that values-led, collaborative, and anticipatory reflection both guides the assessment of potential social and ethical impacts and steers responsible innovation practices. This workbook is the first part of a pair that provides the concepts and tools needed to put AI Sustainability into practice. It introduces the SUM Values, which help AI project teams to assess the potential societal impacts and ethical permissibility of their projects. It then presents a Stakeholder Engagement Process (SEP), which provides tools to facilitate proportionate engagement of and input from stakeholders with an emphasis on equitable and meaningful participation and positionality awareness.