How to Read the White House’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights
Nearly a year ago, Dr. Alondra Nelson of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) shared a vision for an AI Bill of Rights, arguing that “our country should clarify the rights and freedoms we expect data-driven technologies to respect.” At Data & Society, we believe that articulating how we govern data-centric technologies is a matter of great urgency, as these technologies impact lives and communities in ways we are only beginning to understand. Today, we are pleased to see the OSTP take a major step toward advancing Dr. Nelson’s vision with the release of its Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.
What is a blueprint for a new bill of rights to govern AI, and how should we read it?
First, we should read it with appreciation for the accomplishment it represents. A year’s turnaround on a government statement called a “bill of rights” is impressive. And it’s the result of a deliberative process which included not only significant consultation with a range of organizations and external stakeholders, but public input solicited through public forums and a comments period; see Data & Society’s comment here. The blueprint’s lengthy legal disclaimer also suggests a line-by-line negotiation with agencies and other actors who would prefer fewer limitations on how we, as a society, choose to develop automated technologies.
Second, we should read the document with an understanding of what it can do going forward. The Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights is as advertised: it’s an outline, articulating a set of principles and their potential applications for approaching the challenge of governing AI through a rights-based framework. This differs from many other approaches to AI governance that use a lens of trust, safety, ethics, responsibility, or other more interpretive frameworks. A rights-based approach is rooted in deeply held American values — equity, opportunity, and self-determination — and longstanding law.
The Blueprint is not a law or a regulatory framework. It’s not enforceable in its current form. What it seeks to provide, as the document itself says, is a “national values statement” that can serve as a guide for both policy and practice. Coming from the White House, its release marks a key moment to define principles, guidelines, and guardrails for how we use this rapidly developing set of data-centric, predictive technologies.
Critically, the Blueprint calls not only for transparency (“Notice and Explanation”), but also for measures of human-mediated accountability, including redress for harms (“Human Alternatives, Consideration, and Fallback”) when AI systems negatively impact people and communities. Including systems of accountability in a core set of values creates a pathway to meaningful shifts in power and control of these systems. The blueprint also cites Data & Society’s work on “algorithmic impact assessments,” an approach and proposed methodology for understanding — before an algorithmic system is put into use and during its use — the range of impacts that a system may have (whether intentional and not), particularly on vulnerable groups and protected classes. This differs from the transparency that “Notice and Explanation” calls for: transparency means that people can find out when and how a system has been used; accountability means that they have an opportunity to seek redress and changes to that system when harms occur.
The blueprint does important work to foreground a concern for communities, a recommendation raised in Data & Society’s public comment to OSTP in which we encouraged a commitment “to research and policy proposals that center community and justice-informed uses of algorithmic systems.” While American law and policy have historically focused on protections for individuals, largely ignoring group harms, the blueprint’s authors note that the “magnitude of the impacts of data-driven automated systems may be most readily visible at the community level.” The blueprint asserts that communities — defined in broad and inclusive terms, from neighborhoods to social networks to Indigenous groups — have the right to protection and redress against harms to the same extent that individuals do.
The blueprint breaks further ground by making that claim through the lens of algorithmic discrimination, and a call, in the language of American civil rights law, for “freedom from” this new type of attack on fundamental American rights. Although this blueprint does not have the force of law, the choice of language and framing clearly positions it as a framework for understanding AI governance broadly as a civil rights issue, one that deserves new and expanded protections under American law. This centering of the civil rights concerns around algorithmic systems calls back to years of community-based and academic research from a range of organizations and scholars — including Data & Society’s 2014 primer — that has articulated instances of discrimination experienced when algorithmic systems are deployed carelessly in settings involving employment, criminal justice, access to education and health care, and many others. Although much work lies ahead to enact robust legal mechanisms to secure these rights, the blueprint provides a foundational case for why policymakers can no longer ignore the everyday realities of contending with algorithmic systems, their harms, and the fact that those harms will only multiply in an increasingly algorithmically governed future.
Above all, the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights is a call to action. It is an invitation to chart a new path forward in designing and governing automated systems. It is a call for creativity and a shift in power as we devise meaningful ways to assess those impacts as well as mechanisms in the language of civil rights. It is up to all of us to make the blueprint a reality, to commit to building inclusive and robust AI governance that speaks directly to American values, and brings with it the power of law and enforceability. In that, the blueprint itself serves as a mandate to engage in these discussions seriously and at the highest levels of government — as well as in the spaces and communities where automation is having a profound impact on all of our rights and freedoms.
