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President Biden recently issued a landmark executive order that establishes new standards for AI safety and security, protects privacy, advances equity and civil rights, stands up for customers and workers, and promotes innovation and competition.
New Standards for AI Safety, Security, Privacy
In the executive order, Biden requires companies developing AI models that pose a severe risk to national security, economic security, or public health to notify the federal government when training the model. They must also share the results of all safety tests.
The Commerce Department will develop guidance for content authentication and watermarking to label AI-generated content.
Additionally, the executive order aims to protect Americans' privacy from the risks of AI and calls on Congress to pass bipartisan data privacy legislation to protect all Americans, especially kids.
The legislation will protect privacy by prioritizing federal support for accelerating the development and use of privacy-preserving techniques, strengthening privacy-preserving research and technologies, evaluating how agencies collect and use commercially available information, and developing guidelines for federal agencies to assess the effectiveness of privacy-preserving techniques.
AI’s Role in Advancing Equity and Civil Rights
Irresponsible uses of AI can lead to and deepen discrimination, bias, and other abuses in justice, healthcare, and housing.
In the executive order, Biden provides clear guidelines to landlords, federal benefits programs, and federal contractors to keep AI algorithms from being used to exacerbate discrimination, address algorithmic discrimination, and ensure fairness throughout the criminal justice system.
Check out our recent article, How Can AI Reduce Bias in Hiring?, for a closer look at how Talent Select AI’s predictive, validated technology helps remove human bias from the hiring process to ensure a fair and equitable assessment process for all applicants.
AI’s Role in Supporting Workers
AI is changing America’s jobs and workplaces but also posing a risk for workplace surveillance, bias, and job displacement.
To support workers’ ability to bargain collectively and invest in workforce training accessible to all, President Biden directs the following actions:
- Developing principles and best practices to mitigate the harms and maximize the benefits of AI for workers by addressing job displacement.
- Produce a report on AI’s potential labor-market impacts and study and identify options for strengthening federal support for workers facing labor disruptions, including from AI.
“The actions that President Biden directed today are vital steps forward in the U.S.’s approach on safe, secure, and trustworthy AI. More action will be required, and the Administration will continue to work with Congress to pursue bipartisan legislation to help America lead the way in responsible innovation,” according to the White House.
“President Biden’s executive order around AI is an important step in ensuring the fair and responsible application of AI in the workplace and helps crystallize usage guidelines and requirements for organizations implementing AI,” Will Rose, Talent Select AI Chief Technology Officer, said in an official statement.
“It’s vital organizations using AI can understand, articulate, and validate how and why specific recommendations or decisions are made by the tool – especially when making decisions that impact people’s livelihoods,” Rose continues.
Talent Select AI’s glass-box model undergoes regular bias audits following EEOC regulations and emerging AI privacy legislation, Rose explains, to ensure accurate, unbiased evaluations and fairness, equity, and consistency for all job applicants. “We’re glad that President Biden is taking necessary steps to help protect Americans as AI technology adoption continues to speed up.”
Ensuring AI Compliance with Emerging Legislation
Technological innovations have expanded the parameters of what we thought artificial intelligence (AI) could do.
Most companies globally either haven’t adopted AI and machine learning (ML) or are still in the research phases. In the U.S., 22% of companies are rolling out AI, and 21% are scaling up the technology, according to a June Workday survey. Additionally, a McKinsey survey indicates that the global market for AI will skyrocket, reaching a valuation of $1.87 trillion by 2032.
But as the use of AI increases, there is a growing concern about the lack of transparency in its decision-making process. AI's “black box” nature can leave us uncertain and skeptical, wondering how AI arrives at its recommendations and decisions.
In a recent article, we discussed how black-box AI models arrive at conclusions or decisions without the ability to explain how they were reached, making it increasingly challenging to identify why an AI model produces biased outputs and where errors in judgement are occurring.
On the other hand, white box AI, sometimes called glass box AI, is transparent about how it comes to conclusions. Humans can look at an algorithm and understand its behavior and the factors influencing its decision-making.
Rose explained that when it comes to AI that can materially impact our lives or livelihoods, like in talent acquisition, organizations must prioritize the explainability and transparency of their AI tools for both ethical and legal reasons.
“If an AI model helps make a hiring decision, it’s critical that we understand and articulate why that decision or recommendation was made,” Rose said.
“As part of Talent Select AI’s validation process, my team continuously investigates and monitors the relationship between assessment outcomes and subgroup membership,” Rose explains. “Our findings support the use of our selection assessment tool as nondiscriminatory against any protected classes, thus ensuring legal defensibility.”
Talent Select AI utilizes three primary sources of guidance for conducting validation research, including:
- The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP) which outlines the federal government's position on how tests should be developed and used in making employment decisions consistent with federal laws and regulatory guidelines.
- The Principles for the Validation and Use of Personnel Selection Procedures which were adopted by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2018 as an authoritative guidelines document for employee selection testing.
- Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing which were approved as APA policy by the APA Council of Representatives in August 2013 and represents the gold standard in guidance on testing in the United States and many other countries.
At Talent Select AI, we're committed to providing explainable AI across all our products. If any questions arise, we'll show you how the decisions were made.
Contact us today to see how we do it.
