AI Sustainability in Practice Part Two: Sustainability Throughout the AI Workflow
This work addresses the problem of real-world AI impacts for project teams and stakeholders, offering incremental guidance on governance mechanisms.
The paper tackles the challenge of ensuring AI sustainability by proposing Stakeholder Impact Assessments (SIAs) as continuous governance tools to evaluate and anticipate harms and benefits throughout AI workflows, providing a practical workbook with templates and methods for implementation.
The sustainability of AI systems depends on the capacity of project teams to proceed with a continuous sensitivity to their potential real-world impacts and transformative effects. Stakeholder Impact Assessments (SIAs) are governance mechanisms that enable this kind of responsiveness. They are tools that create a procedure for, and a means of documenting, the collaborative evaluation and reflective anticipation of the possible harms and benefits of AI innovation projects. SIAs are not one-off governance actions. They require project teams to pay continuous attention to the dynamic and changing character of AI production and use and to the shifting conditions of the real-world environments in which AI technologies are embedded. This workbook is part two of two workbooks on AI Sustainability. It provides a template of the SIA and activities that allow a deeper dive into crucial parts of it. It discusses methods for weighing values and considering trade-offs during the SIA. And, it highlights the need to treat the SIA as an end-to-end process of responsive evaluation and re-assessment.