AMBIGUITY LEADS TO CONFUSION
In the growing field of AI Ethics and Governance, the call for “Algorithm Audits” as a means of mitigating the risk posed by the rapid integration of AI into our everyday lives has been getting louder. However, ambiguity over what constitutes an AI audit has led to confusion and uncertainty, and as the rhetoric around recent “audits'' ramps up, the industry is in danger of misusing terms that have well- established meanings in the world of financial auditing. Casual use of the term audit simply means “to do a deep dive into fairness, accountability, and transparency of the algorithm”, an audit with a small ‘a’, as it were. Audit and Assurance, with a capital “A”, is different, and well understood to practitioners to refer to a robust, long-established, set of principles and approach first developed in the financial services sector. We watched as the AI Ethics industry has mistakenly deployed these terms creating harmful confusion for the public and for the owners of algorithms.
