Insight Type: Research Note

Microsoft Research AI ethics checklist is a set of published principles for designing ethics checklists that can be readily operationalized in AI DevOps processes. We commend Microsoft Research’s recent effort to catalyze consensus within the practitioner community for the purpose of developing clear principles for designing operationalizable AI ethics checklists. Though the researchers don’t publish a one-size-fits-all operationalizable AI ethics checklist, they provide a useful discussion of the scenarios within which checklists can be helpful, and also within which they can be counterproductive or irrelevant to their intended users. This is important as the abstract nature of AI ethics principles makes them difficult for practitioners to operationalize. As befits the scope of this topic, AI applications and tool vendors are still trying to bring their ethics-assurance frameworks into coherent shape. Everybody—even the supposed experts—are groping for a consensus approach and practical tools to make ethics assurance a core component of AI DevOps governance.