Introducing Our "Ethics in Action" Blog Series

Welcome to the first instalment of our "Ethics in Action" blog series! Over the coming months, we'll be pulling back the curtain to show you exactly how deliberAIde puts our ethical commitments into practice – not just as lofty ideals, but as concrete actions that shape our daily work. After all, ethical AI development isn't just about good intentions. It's about taking real actions: rolling up your sleeves and doing the hard work to ensure that your technologies genuinely reflect the rights, needs, interests, and preferences of those affected by them.

Following this one, each post in this six-part series will spotlight two of our ten ethical principles, shedding light on the various practical ways we weave them into our work. We'll walk you through the tangible steps we're taking to operationalise our stated principles, detailing our concrete efforts to uphold them and sharing examples of how they influence our product development practices.

An Outline of Our Ethical Principles

At deliberAIde, our mission is to leverage AI tools to make deliberative processes more inclusive, effective, and accessible. However, given that AI integrations in such contexts also bring with them some potential risks, we have established ten core principles that guide everything we do:

• Preserving Human Agency: we are committed to providing our users with the ability to maintain meaningful oversight and control, from start to finish, over determining which and how different AI tools are employed within their specific contexts.

• Protecting Data Privacy: we are committed to protecting user privacy across all of our operations and to adhering to the various privacy standards of different stakeholder communities.
• Championing Deliberative Stakeholder Engagement: we are committed to promoting fair, inclusive, collectively driven, positive-sum decision-making and participatory design processes that enable various stakeholders to shape not only our own products and services, but also the products and services of our clients and partners.
• Maintaining a Diverse Team: we are committed to upholding diversity across our team and operations to cultivate an environment in which varied perspectives are constantly leveraged to propel us closer to our goal of making deliberative processes accessible, beneficial and representative of all potential stakeholder groups who may use or be affected by the use of our tools.
• Upholding Transparency: we are committed to adhering to the highest standards of transparency, both with respect to our technical operations (i.e. to do with the inner workings of our AI systems/tools) and our organisational ones (i.e. to do with our internal or external business practices and decisions).
• Taking Accountability Seriously: we are committed to always complying with relevant regulations and adhering to local laws in the jurisdictions in which we operate, and to taking responsibility for all the decisions we make and for the outcomes generated by our tools, whether positive or negative.
• Advancing Universal Accessibility and Inclusion: we are committed to developing inclusive tools and providing services that lower access barriers to deliberative engagement processes, ensuring that anyone can participate in deliberations, regardless of who they are, where they are from, or what language they speak.
• Sustaining Our For-Purpose Motive: we are committed to ensuring that our main mission (i.e. to enhance the inclusivity, quality, scalability, legitimacy and impact of deliberative processes world-wide) remains unchangeable and always represents deliberAIde's raison d'être, making sure that profit-generation never becomes an end in itself but rather merely a means to serving our mission.
• Ensuring System Robustness, Trustworthiness, and Safety: we are committed to establishing rigorous testing and evaluation protocols for the AI models and systems on which our tools are built, and to proactively removing inappropriate or harmful content and exclusionary biases from our tools to ensure that they are as safe, accurate and reliable in their outputs as possible.
• Safeguarding Ecological Sustainability: we are committed to continually assessing the environmental impacts of our tools and to taking tangible steps throughout their full development and deployment lifecycles in order to actively protect and replenish our world's finite natural resources and life-sustaining ecological systems.

Together, these principles demonstrate our commitment to developing AI as a force for good - one that puts people first by prioritising user agency, protecting privacy, and adapting to the complex real-world needs of deliberative democracy practitioners and local communities.

While we're still in the early stages of this journey, we're committed to continually refining our principles and reporting on our progress. We promise to be radically transparent about both our successes and the areas where we still need to improve, inviting open dialogue so we can collectively shape best practices for integrating AI tools within deliberative democracy contexts. By openly sharing our experiences, we hope to contribute to broader conversations about ethical AI development and deployment and to inspire other organisations to put ethics front and centre in their own AI projects.

Closing remarks

We hope you enjoyed this brief, high-level introduction to our ethical principles.

The next post in this series will unpack how we operationalise our first two principles - namely 'Preserving Human Agency' and 'Protecting Data Privacy' - so stay tuned if you're interested in finding out more!