Rebuilding Trust: Queer in AI Approach to Artificial Intelligence Risk Management

Abstract: Trustworthy AI has become an important topic because trust in AI systems and their creators has been lost. Researchers, corporations, and governments have long and painful histories of excluding marginalized groups from technology development, deployment, and oversight. As a result, these technologies are less useful and even harmful to minoritized groups. We argue that any AI development, deployment, and monitoring framework that aspires to trust must incorporate both feminist, non-exploitative participatory design principles and strong, outside, and continual monitoring and testing. We additionally explain the importance of considering aspects of trustworthiness beyond just transparency, fairness, and accountability, specifically, to consider justice and shifting power to the disempowered as core values to any trustworthy AI system. Creating trustworthy AI starts by funding, supporting, and empowering grassroots organizations like Queer in AI so the field of AI has the diversity and inclusion to credibly and effectively develop trustworthy AI. We leverage the expert knowledge Queer in AI has developed through its years of work and advocacy to discuss if and how gender, sexuality, and other aspects of queer identity should be used in datasets and AI systems and how harms along these lines should be mitigated. Based on this, we share a gendered approach to AI and further propose a queer epistemology and analyze the benefits it can bring to AI. We additionally discuss how to regulate AI with this queer epistemology in vision, proposing frameworks for making policies related to AI & gender diversity and privacy & queer data protection.