Societal harms perpetuated by artificial intelligence are well documented. Although some organisations and individuals have taken steps to counter harms in their work, these problems continue to arise as AI technology proliferates. From discriminatory bail algorithms to racist facial recognition matches to flawed healthcare algorithms, the pernicious consequences of AI technologies beg the question: how can we change the culture of AI research and development to foreground preventing harms to society? 

Generating cultural change is no easy feat. It requires buy-in and participation well beyond the researchers who have been sounding the alarms on harmful AI. And until everyone accounts for the ethical and societal consequences of their AI work, there will continue to be deleterious effects – disproportionately so for groups already marginalised by society.  

Key to this change is acknowledging that ethical and societally responsible AI research must be a collective pursuit, not an individual one, and that individualised notions of harm, entrenched in current solutions, are unsuitable. We must expand our commitments to ethical research and development to being as broad in scope as the potential harms of the work we do.  

Clearly, institutional structures – the rules, incentives and processes that apply to those that work within a given institution – are essential for shaping the behaviour of researchers and promoting a different culture of reflecting and intervening on potential AI-driven harms. 

To foster this cultural shift in AI research at Stanford University in the United States, we have created the Ethics & Society Review (ESR), a new institutional mechanism that embeds a reflective coaching process within grantmaking at the University. The ESR requires that researchers engage with an interdisciplinary panel of ethics experts to identify potential societal harms that could follow from their proposed work and devise appropriate solutions for them. Only after researchers participate in the process and the ESR panel shares its funding recommendation does the grant organisation release funds.