An Action-Oriented AI Policy Toolkit for Technology Audits by Community Advocates and Activists

Motivated by the extensive documented disparate harms of artificial intelligence (AI), many recent practitioner-facing reflective tools have been created to promote responsible AI development. However, the use of such tools internally by technology development firms addresses responsible AI as an issue of closed-door compliance rather than a matter of public concern. Recent advocate and activist efforts intervene in AI as a public policy problem, inciting a growing number of cities to pass bans or other ordinances on AI and surveillance technologies. In support of this broader ecology of political actors, we present a set of reflective tools intended to increase public participation in technology advocacy for AI policy action. To this end, the Algorithmic Equity Toolkit (the AEKit) provides a practical policy-facing definition of AI, a flowchart for assessing technologies against that definition, a worksheet for decomposing AI systems into constituent parts, and a list of probing questions that can be posed to vendors, policy-makers, or government agencies. The AEKit carries an action-orientation towards political encounters between community groups in the public and their representatives, opening up the work of AI reflection and remediation to multiple points of intervention. Unlike current reflective tools available to practitioners, our toolkit carries with it a politics of community participation and activism.