Department of Labor Releases AI Best Practices for Employers • Michigan Advance

The U.S. Department of Labor this week released a list of artificial intelligence best practices for developers and employers, aimed at helping employers benefit from the potential time and cost savings of AI while protecting workers from discrimination and job displacement.

The voluntary guidelines come about a year after President Joe Biden signed an executive order to assess the innovative potential and risks of AI in the government and private sectors. The order directed the creation of the White House AI Council, the creation of a framework for federal agencies to follow regarding privacy protection, and a list of guidelines for securing AI talent, for navigating the effects on the job market and to ensure equity in AI. use, among others.

“Harnessing AI for good and realizing its countless benefits requires mitigating its substantial risks,” Biden said of the executive order last year. “This effort requires a society-wide effort that includes government, the private sector, academia and civil society.”

The DOL guide, “Artificial Intelligence and Worker Well-Being: Principles and Best Practices for Developers and Employers” was developed with input from public hearing sessions and from workers, unions, researchers, academics, employers and developers. It aims to mitigate the risks of discrimination, data breaches and job replacement by AI, while embracing potential innovation and production.

“Whether AI in the workplace creates harm for workers and deepens inequality or supports workers and unlocks expansive opportunities depends (in large part) on the decisions we make,” said DOL Acting Secretary Julie Su. “The stakes are high.”

The report shares eight principles and best practices, with a “north star” of worker centricity. The guide says that workers, especially from disadvantaged communities, must understand and contribute to the design, development, testing, training, use and supervision of AI systems used in their workplaces. This will improve the quality of employment and allow companies to deliver on their results. Unions must negotiate in good faith about the use of AI and electronic monitoring in the workplace, he said.

Other best practices include ethical AI development, with training that protects and receives feedback from workers. Organizations must also have a clear governance system for evaluating AI used in the workplace and must be transparent about the AI ​​systems they use, the DOL said.

AI systems cannot violate or undermine workers’ rights to organize, nor obstruct their health, safety, wage, anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation protections, the department said. Therefore, prior to deployment, employers should audit their AI systems to detect potential impacts of discrimination based on “race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, age, genetic information and other protected bases,” and should make these results public.

The report also outlines how employers can and should help workers with AI. Before implementing an AI tool, employers must consider the impact it will have on employment opportunities and must be clear about the specific tasks it will perform. Employers who realize productivity gains or increased profits should consider sharing the benefits with their workers, for example, through wage increases, better benefits or training, the DOL said.

The implementation of AI systems has the potential to displace workers, Su said in his summary. To mitigate this situation, employers must adequately train their employees to use these systems and reassign workers who are displaced by AI to other jobs within their organization when possible. Employers should turn to state and local workforce education and skills improvement programs so that their workforce can learn new skills and not be wiped out by technology.

And finally, employers who use AI to collect employee data must safeguard that data, must not collect more data than is absolutely necessary, and must not share that data outside the company without the freely given consent of employees.

The guidelines outlined by the DOL are not intended to be “a replacement for existing or future federal or state laws and regulations,” he said, but rather a “guiding framework for companies” that can be customized with feedback from their workers.

“We must think of AI as a potentially powerful technology for worker well-being, and we must harness our collective human talents to design and use AI with workers as its beneficiaries, not obstacles to innovation,” Su said.