Responsible AI

As AI agents are increasingly used in high-stakes domains like healthcare and law enforcement, aligning their behaviour with social, legal, ethical, empathetic, and cultural (SLEEC) norms has become a critical engineering challenge. While international frameworks have established high-level normative principles for AI, a significant gap remains in translating these abstract principles into concrete, verifiable requirements. To address this gap, we propose a systematic SLEEC-norm operationalisation process for determining, validating, implementing, and verifying normative requirements. Furthermore, we survey the landscape of methods and tools supporting this process, and identify key remaining challenges and research avenues for addressing them. We thus establish a framework - and define a research and policy agenda - for developing AI agents that are not only functionally useful but also demonstrably aligned with human norms and values.

Meta-research and Trustworthy AI (TAI) share common goals, namely improving evidence, robustness, and transparency, yet there is very little interplay between the two fields. To investigate the potential benefits of closer collaboration between the domains of TAI in healthcare and meta-research, we convened an interdisciplinary workshop funded by the Volkswagen Foundation in February 2025. The workshop aimed to collaboratively examine key challenges in translating AI ethics principles into practice and to identify potential solutions informed by meta-research approaches. A Design Thinking-informed co-creation approach was followed by an inductive descriptive analysis of the outputs. Our results demonstrate how meta-research can offer concrete contributions to address pressing challenges of TAI in healthcare. These challenges include the dynamic and complex nature of TAI ethical requirements and principles, common terminology and understanding of TAI, ensuring robustness, replicability, and reproducibility, choosing adequate evaluation metrics, lack of transparency, advancing preclinical biomedical research, and validation in real-world clinical environments. We present a catalog of ideas and a roadmap for future research, which synthesize existing interconnections and identify concrete next steps and open research gaps, thereby serving as a foundation for future interdisciplinary efforts.

In a previous work, we introduced the fuzzy Ethical Decision-Making framework (fEDM), a risk-based ethical reasoning architecture grounded in fuzzy logic. The original model combined a fuzzy Ethical Risk Assessment module (fERA) with ethical decision rules, enabled formal structural verification through Fuzzy Petri Nets (FPNs), and validated outputs against a single normative referent. Although this approach ensured formal soundness and decision consistency, it did not fully address two critical challenges: principled explainability of decisions and robustness under ethical pluralism. In this paper, we extend fEDM in two major directions. First, we introduce an Explainability and Traceability Module (ETM) that explicitly links each ethical decision rule to the underlying moral principles and computes a weighted principle-contribution profile for every recommended action. This enables transparent, auditable explanations that expose not only what decision was made but why, and on the basis of which principles. Second, we replace single-referent validation with a pluralistic semantic validation framework that evaluates decisions against multiple stakeholder referents, each encoding distinct principle priorities and risk tolerances. This shift allows principled disagreement to be formally represented rather than suppressed, thus increasing robustness and contextual sensitivity. The resulting extended fEDM, called fEDM+, preserves formal verifiability while achieving enhanced interpretability and stakeholder-aware validation, making it suitable as an oversight and governance layer for ethically sensitive AI systems.

This position paper argues that the machine learning community must move from preaching to practising data frugality for responsible artificial intelligence (AI) development. For too long, progress has been equated with ever-larger datasets, driving remarkable advances but now yielding increasingly diminishing performance gains alongside rising energy use and carbon emissions. While awareness of data frugal approaches has grown, their adoption has remained rhetorical, and data scaling continues to dominate development practice. We argue that this gap between preach and practice must be closed, as continued data scaling entails substantial and under-accounted environmental impacts. To ground our position, we provide indicative estimates of the energy use and carbon emissions associated with the downstream use of ImageNet-1K. We then present empirical evidence that data frugality is both practical and beneficial, demonstrating that subset selection methods can substantially reduce training energy consumption with little loss in accuracy, while also mitigating dataset bias. Finally, we outline actionable recommendations for moving data frugality from rhetorical preaching to concrete practice for responsible development of AI.

Children are increasingly using technologies powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, there are growing concerns about privacy risks, particularly for children. Although existing privacy regulations require companies and organizations to implement protections, doing so can be challenging in practice. To address this challenge, this article proposes a framework based on Privacy-by-Design (PbD), which guides designers and developers to take on a proactive and risk-averse approach to technology design. Our framework includes principles from several privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from the European Union, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) from Canada, and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) from the United States. We map these principles to various stages of applications that use Large Language Models (LLMs), including data collection, model training, operational monitoring, and ongoing validation. For each stage, we discuss the operational controls found in the recent academic literature to help AI service providers and developers reduce privacy risks while meeting legal standards. In addition, the framework includes design guidelines for children, drawing from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the UK's Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC), and recent academic research. To demonstrate how this framework can be applied in practice, we present a case study of an LLM-based educational tutor for children under 13. Through our analysis and the case study, we show that by using data protection strategies such as technical and organizational controls and making age-appropriate design decisions throughout the LLM life cycle, we can support the development of AI applications for children that provide privacy protections and comply with legal requirements.

Across academia, industry, and government, AI'' has become central in research and development, regulatory debates, and promises of ever faster and more capable decision-making and action. In numerous domains, especially safety-critical ones, there are significant concerns over how AI'' may affect decision-making, responsibility, or the likelihood of mistakes (to name only a few categories of critique). However, for most critiques, the target is generally AI'', a broad term admitting many (types of) systems used for a variety of tasks and each coming with its own set of limitations, challenges, and potential use cases. In this article, we focus on the military domain as a case study and present both a loose enumerative taxonomy of systems captured under the umbrella term military AI'', as well as discussion of the challenges of each. In doing so, we highlight that critiques of one (type of) system will not always transfer to other (types of) systems. Building on this, we argue that in order for debates to move forward fruitfully, it is imperative that the discussions be made more precise and that AI'' be excised from debates to the extent possible. Researchers, developers, and policy-makers should make clear exactly what systems they have in mind and what possible benefits and risks attend the deployment of those particular systems. While we focus on AI in the military as an exemplar for the overall trends in discussions of AI'', the argument's conclusions are broad and have import for discussions of AI across a host of domains.

Dataset documentation is widely recognized as essential for the responsible development of automated systems. Despite growing efforts to support documentation through different kinds of artifacts, little is known about the motivations shaping documentation tool design or the factors hindering their adoption. We present a systematic review supported by mixed-methods analysis of 59 dataset documentation publications to examine the motivations behind building documentation tools, how authors conceptualize documentation practices, and how these tools connect to existing systems, regulations, and cultural norms. Our analysis shows four persistent patterns in dataset documentation conceptualization that potentially impede adoption and standardization: unclear operationalizations of documentation's value, decontextualized designs, unaddressed labor demands, and a tendency to treat integration as future work. Building on these findings, we propose a shift in Responsible AI tool design toward institutional rather than individual solutions, and outline actions the HCI community can take to enable sustainable documentation practices.

Artificial intelligence pipelines -- spanning data collection, model training, deployment, and post-deployment monitoring -- concentrate ethical risks that intensify with multimodal and agentic systems. Existing governance instruments, including the EU AI Act, the IEEE 7000 series, and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, provide high-level guidance but often lack enforceable, end-to-end operational controls. This paper presents an ethics-by-design control architecture that embeds consequentialist, deontological, and virtue-ethical reasoning into stage-specific enforcement mechanisms across the AI lifecycle. The framework implements a triple-gate structure at each lifecycle stage: Metric gates (quantitative performance and safety thresholds), Governance gates (legal, rights, and procedural compliance), and Eco gates (carbon and water budgets and sustainability constraints). It specifies measurable trigger conditions, escalation paths, audit artefacts, and mappings to EU AI Act obligations and NIST RMF functions, enabling integration with existing MLOps and CI/CD pipelines. Illustrative examples from large language model pipelines demonstrate how gate-based controls can surface and constrain technical, social, and environmental risks prior to release and during runtime. The framework is accompanied by a preregistered evaluation protocol that defines ex ante success criteria and assessment procedures, enabling falsifiable evaluation of gate effectiveness. By translating normative commitments into enforceable and testable controls, the framework provides a practical basis for operational AI governance across organizational contexts, jurisdictions, and deployment scales.

Equity Bias is a philosophical and practical framework for building more equitable AI systems. It treats AI as an interpretive agent that constructs meaning and knowledge rather than as a neutral calculator. Grounded in Gadamerian hermeneutics and epistemic injustice theory, Equity Bias views bias not as an error to eliminate but as a reflection of whose knowledge is encoded into systems. Since all knowledge is situated, neutral systems are not possible. While traditional approaches aim to reduce or remove bias, Equity Bias instead makes bias transparent and contestable. Its three-stage AI Life Cycle (Equity Archaeology, Co-Creating Meaning, and Ongoing Accountability) turns these principles into practice. Equity Bias gives developers, researchers, policymakers, and communities affected by AI a method for examining whose knowledge a system encodes and who has the power to contest it. By placing the politics of knowledge at the centre of equitable AI design, Equity Bias offers a distinct approach to AI ethics.

Generative AI systems increasingly enable the production of highly realistic synthetic media. Civitai, a popular community-driven platform for AI-generated content, operates a monetized feature called Bounties, which allows users to commission the generation of content in exchange for payment. To examine how this mechanism is used and what content it incentivizes, we conduct a longitudinal analysis of all publicly available bounty requests collected over a 14-month period following the platform's launch. We find that the bounty marketplace is dominated by tools that let users steer AI models toward content they were not trained to generate. At the same time, requests for content that is "Not Safe For Work" are widespread and have increased steadily over time, now comprising a majority of all bounties. Participation in bounty creation is uneven, with 20% of requesters accounting for roughly half of requests. Requests for "deepfake" - media depicting identifiable real individuals - exhibit a higher concentration than other types of bounties. A nontrivial subset of these requests involves explicit deepfakes despite platform policies prohibiting such content. These bounties disproportionately target female celebrities, revealing a pronounced gender asymmetry in social harm. Together, these findings show how monetized, community-driven generative AI platforms can produce gendered harms, raising questions about consent, governance, and enforcement.

Despite AI's promise, little is known about how mission-driven organizations (MDOs) adopt AI. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 experts and leaders within environmental, humanitarian, and development organizations across the Global North and South. We find that MDOs adopt AI selectively, with uses in content creation and data analysis, while maintaining human oversight for mission-critical applications. In case of conflicts between the organization's values and efficiency, participants consider sustainability, neutrality, and community trust as constraints that could limit or prevent AI adoption. Individual adoption of AI is not translated into organizational practice due to fragmented data infrastructure, lack of in-house expertise, inertia, ethical challenges, and dependency on vendors. Participants expected AI use in MDOs to involve institutional control over infrastructure, support for missions, and human-centered human-AI collaboration. We contribute an analysis on how MDOs manage AI adoption, identify barriers to responsible deployment, and provide recommendations for designing mission-aligned AI systems.

Peer support plays a vital role in expanding access to mental health care by providing empathetic, community-based support outside formal clinical systems. As digital platforms increasingly mediate such support, the design and impact of these technologies remain under-examined, particularly in Asian contexts. This paper presents findings from an interview study with 20 peer supporters in Singapore, who operate across diverse online, offline, and hybrid environments. Through a thematic analysis, we unpack how participants start, conduct, and sustain peer support, highlighting their motivations, emotional labour, and the sociocultural dimensions shaping their practices. Building on this grounded understanding, we surface design directions for culturally responsive digital tools that scaffold rather than supplant relational care. Drawing insights from qualitative accounts, we offer a situated perspective on how AI might responsibly augment peer support. This research contributes to human-centred computing by articulating the lived realities of peer supporters and proposing design implications for trustworthy and context-sensitive AI in mental health.