Ethical Alignment of AI Systems

This project focuses on the importance of ethical alignment in AI systems, particularly those designed with citizen end users in mind. It explores the intersection of responsible AI, socio-technical systems, and citizen-centric design. It proposes that addressing the ethical aspect of decisions in citizen-centric AI systems enhances trust and acceptance of AI technologies.

We focus on four key areas:

We put forward a research roadmap by identifying challenges in these areas and highlighting solution concepts with the potential to address them.

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As a part of this project, we have developed a serious game that helps elicit ethical preferences in a more dynamic and engaging way than traditional methods, such as questionnaires or simple dilemmas. In this game, the player operates a drone in a rescue setting. The drone can extinguish fires in buildings while flying over a city. It faces different kinds of ethical dilemmas while rescuing people by extinguishing the fire and acts as per the player’s response. In the end, based on all the choices and responses of the player in the game, we infer their ethical preferences in this setting.

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Publications

1. Jayati Deshmukh, Zijie Liang, Vahid Yazdanpanah, Sebastian Stein, and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn. “Serious Games for Ethical Preference Elicitation”. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2025 demonstration track, to appear). Detroit, USA, 2025. pdf: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/498743/1/Serious_Games_AAMAS_2025_Demo-1.pdf
2. Jayati Deshmukh, Vahid Yazdanpanah, Sebastian Stein, and Timothy J Norman. “Ethical Alignment in Citizen-Centric AI”. In: Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Springer. 2024, pp. 43–55. url: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0128-8_4

Serious Game Demo Video