The Center for Democracy and Technology's brief clarifies misconceptions about artificial intelligence (AI) in government services, emphasizing the need for precise definitions, awareness of AI's limitations, recognition of inherent biases, and acknowledgment of the significant resources required for effective implementation.
Automated decision systems (ADS) are increasingly used in government decision-making but lack clear definitions, oversight, and accountability mechanisms.
This post argues that for the types of large-scale, organized fraud attacks that many state benefits systems saw during the pandemic, solutions grounded in cybersecurity methods may be far more effective than creating or adopting automated systems.
This report analyzes lawsuits that have been filed within the past 10 years arising from the use of algorithm-driven systems to assess people’s eligibility for, or the distribution of, public benefits. It identifies key insights from the various cases into what went wrong and analyzes the legal arguments that plaintiffs have used to challenge those systems in court.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has identified five principles that should guide the design, use, and deployment of automated systems to protect the American public in the age of artificial intelligence. These principles help provide guidance whenever automated systems can meaningfully impact the public’s rights, opportunities, or access to critical needs.
The primer–originally prepared for the Progressive Congressional Caucus’ Tech Algorithm Briefing–explores the trade-offs and debates about algorithms and accountability across several key ethical dimensions, including fairness and bias; opacity and transparency; and lack of standards for auditing.
For the past year, modernization teams at the Department of Labor (DOL) have been helping states identify opportunities to automate rote, non-discretionary, manual tasks, with the goal of helping them speed up the time that it takes to process claims. This post provides more context on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and potential use cases in unemployment insurance.
This analysis examines the surge in U.S. state-level AI legislation in 2023, highlighting enacted laws, proposed bills, and emerging regulatory trends.
This report by EPIC investigates how automated decision-making (ADM) systems are used across Washington, D.C.’s public services and the resulting impacts on equity, privacy, and access to benefits.
This essay explains why the Center on Privacy & Technology has chosen to stop using terms like "artificial intelligence," "AI," and "machine learning," arguing that such language obscures human accountability and overstates the capabilities of these technologies.
This academic paper examines predictive optimization, a category of decision-making algorithms that use machine learning (ML) to predict future outcomes of interest about individuals. Through this examination, the authors explore how predictive optimization can raise concerns that make its use illegitimate and challenge claims about predictive optimization's accuracy, efficiency, and fairness.
