UKRI pledges £50m to develop ‘trustworthy’ AI

The bulk of this money - £31m – will go to Responsible AI UK, a consortium led by the University of Southampton whose goal is to foster the safe and accountable use of AI. Headed by Southampton’s Professor Gopal Ramchurn, the consortium will help people understand what responsible and trustworthy AI is, how to develop it and build it into existing systems, as well as the impacts it will have on society.

 “Trustworthy AI tends to be looked at from a very technical perspective – ie it is tested and validated in well-defined settings,” said Ramchurn, a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southampton. “However, that doesn’t mean it will be trusted by the public, government, and industry.

 “AI tends to be looked at by the tech community as AI that has been thoroughly tested. It can be AI that is trustworthy by the technical functionality of the application and the particular closed environments it has been tested in, but it is not trusted because maybe it uses personal data, you know, uses your personal data in ways that you would not want it to do.”