Safe and responsible AI for the public sector

  • 7 minutes

In the video, Elizabeth Emanuel, Senior Corporate Counsel for Worldwide Public Sector at Microsoft, explains the importance of meeting legal compliance when public sector organizations adopt generative AI policies. As Elizabeth says: "Public sector organizations have a high bar of legal compliance that must be met to ensure the use of AI reflects the values and priorities required for public trust."

Public sector organizations should create and adhere to conscientious AI strategies and integrate these approaches into guiding principles, operational practices, tools, and governance.

This process might involve:

  • Developing new or adopting existing policies and guidelines
  • Providing training for staff to ensure they’re aware of the considerations associated with AI
  • Ensuring that data used to train AI models is representative and assessed for bias
  • Establish governance bodies to subject sensitive use cases to particularly high scrutiny and use tooling and telemetry to ensure that they're functioning as intended and not causing unintended harm
  • Ensuring accountability for both the development and operation of AI capabilities and AI-enabled systems

One tool that helps public sector organizations implement AI responsibly is the Azure AI Content Safety Studio. Content Safety Studio uses AI to create safer online spaces by classifying harmful content into four categories:

  • Hate
  • Sexual
  • Self-harm
  • Violence

The AI models detect these types of content and assign a severity score. Based on the severity score, content is surfaced and actions are assigned.

Public sector organizations using Content Safety Studio can prioritize what content moderators review with end goals of:

  • Managing and analyzing user-generated content
  • Ensuring compliance with guidelines
  • Maintaining a safe online environment

Responsible AI should be ingrained as standard practice—not an afterthought—for public sector organizations. By doing so, they can use AI effectively to enhance services and ultimately help society.