Let’s revisit

AI Guild Values and Code of Conduct

What AI Guild membership means

Values

AI Guild activities are carried out in alignment with our values. Every AI Guild member accepts these values, is fully aware of them, and committed to act in alignment.

  1. Diversity: We stand for diversity, and are providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for everyone regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ability, ethnicity, nationality and socioeconomic status
  2. Communication: We treat each other and our partners with respect, fairness, empathy and kindness, and communicate transparently and honestly
  3. Best idea wins: We follow a best idea wins approach informed by scientific evidence and governed by democratic processes
  4. Responsibility: We take responsibility for every action we take

Code of Conduct

This Code of Conduct outlines our expectations for all those who participate in our community, as well as the consequences for unacceptable behaviour.

1. Ethical AI

Expected Behaviour

  • Communication: Machine Translation, Text2Speech, Speech2Text to improve accessibility of information and allow people to communicate across language barriers.
  • Education: increasing the availability and quality of education measures and educational tools through e.g. reduced cost, increased interactiveness, personalisation.
  • Mobility: Self-driving cars to reduce accidents and increase comfort.
  • Robotics: replace dangerous or hard labour, mundane tasks (cleaning).
  • Smart Personal Assistants: save time, increase productivity and automate monotonous tasks.
  • Wildlife conservation: automatically photograph, classify and count wild animals.
  • Energy Sector: building algorithms (intentional or unintentional) which might lead to a blackout or a system overload or an accident.
  • Financial Sector: consultancy services, where decision on whether a person might get a credit or not is based on sex, age or skin colour instead of more reliable and objective backgrounds.
  • Politics: not giving enough information to the system, or not covering all possible candidates. This might lead to influencing of the outcome. Here it doesn’t matter whether it was manipulated, or the failure is coming out of the insufficient knowledge of the developers. The impact might be catastrophic.
  • Judicial system: bias against minorities.
  • Face recognition for surveillance, identifying and tracking individuals with AI.
  • Personalized news feeds that manipulate users with fake news.
  • Covert AI systems: not letting the user know that she/he is dealing with an AI.
  • AI-enabled citizen scoring in violation of fundamental rights.
  • Lethal autonomous weapon systems.
  • Cyberwar, AI viruses/malicious software.

2. Diversity

Expected Behaviour

  • Build and maintain a culture of inclusiveness, make everyone feel welcome.
  • Appreciate everyone’s contributions, bring up accomplishments, provide chances to grow skills, listen, support each other.
  • Share valuable information about projects and opportunities through channels that are accessible to everyone and not through channels that favour people with certain (majority) attributes.
  • Establish indicators of diversity and keep track of them.
  • Promote the AI Guild to underrepresented groups.
  • Ensure diversity in the decision-making, not only in membership in general.
  • Recruitment practices limited to certain elite schools.
  • Pre-judging people based on membership of social groups.
  • Speech or behaviours that are offensive to members of certain groups, particularly when they indicated it.
  • Conducting meetings in venues that inconvenience and exclude some participants.
  • We have members from conflicting countries. Some of them are in the pre/post or ever war state some of them are in the stage of the so-called frozen conflict. AI Guild is not a place to take interstate conflicts to the personal level.
  • The AI Guild is not a place of political polarization or tribalism and so discussions of politics should focus on topics relevant to the AI Guild and its activities.

3. Communication

Expected Behaviour

  • By criticizing someone’s work, we give constructive feedback and possible solutions which from the point of view of the criticizer might provide better results.
  • “You do not have a degree in this field, therefore your opinion is less valuable than someone with a PhD or longer experience.”
  • “Didn’t anybody tell you about the meeting yesterday? Too bad, now you can’t join our discussion.”

4. Best idea wins

Expected Behaviour

  • Intrinsic pros and cons of the approaches, such as “we can expect an intermediate/mediocre result but within a short period of time” or “we can expect high output values, but the work requires a team of 5 people working on it for a year”
  • the motivation for adopting the solution, “what’s the opportunity?”, or inversely the bad examples for not having adopted it so far/ consequences of not adopting the suggested solution
  • the metrics: ethical reasoning, alignment with output values, budget, timing, other relevant indicators (or realistic estimates when certainty is not achievable)

5. Responsibility

Expected Behaviour

Implementation

1. Consequences of Unacceptable Behaviour

Unacceptable behaviour from any community member, including sponsors and those with decision-making authority, will not be tolerated. Anyone asked to stop unacceptable behaviour is expected to comply immediately.

2. If You Witness or Are Subject to Unacceptable Behaviour

If you are subject to or witness unacceptable behaviour, or have any other concerns, please notify someone from the organizer or ethics group as soon as possible. Additionally, community organizers are available to help community members engage with local law enforcement or to otherwise help those experiencing unacceptable behaviour feel safe. In the context of in-person events, organizers will also provide escorts as desired by the person experiencing distress.

3. Addressing Grievances

If you feel you have been falsely or unfairly accused of violating this Code of Conduct, you should notify one of the event organizers with a concise description of your grievance. Your grievance will be handled in accordance with our existing governing policies.

4. Conflicts

We encourage constructive disagreements, and trust that in most cases they can be resolved by the members themselves. Should you require assistance in conflict resolution, our mediators are there to help. We don’t tolerate physical, verbal, psychological, sexual or social violence and will treat it as a violation of this Code of Conduct.

5. Conflict of Interest

When acting on behalf of the AI Guild, such as being a member of a committee or an event organizer, you need to declare any real or perceived conflict of interest. Reach out to one of our mediators for advice on what is and is not a conflict of interest and how it should be handled. Please refer to the EU guidelines that we model our approach on.

6. Scope

We expect all community participants (contributors, paid or otherwise; sponsors; and other stakeholders) to abide by this Code of Conduct in all community venues — online and in-person — as well as in all one-on-one communications pertaining to community business.”

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Publications of the AI Guild and it’s members

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