A Toolkit for Compliance, a Toolkit for Justice: Drawing on Cross-sectoral Expertise to Develop a Pro-justice EU AI Act Toolkit

Abstract

The introduction of the AI Act in the European Union presents the AI research and practice community with a set of new challenges related to compliance. While it is certain that AI practitioners will require additional guidance and tools to meet these requirements, previous research on toolkits that aim to translate the ‘theory’ of AI ethics into development and deployment ‘practice’ suggests that such resources suffer from multiple limitations. These limitations stem, in part, from the fact that the toolkits are either produced by industry-based teams (often presenting ‘ethical practice’ as a box-ticking compliance exercise) or by academics whose work tends to be abstract and divorced from the realities of industry. In this paper, we discuss the challenge of developing an AI ethics toolkit for practitioners that helps them comply with new AI-focused regulation, but that also moves beyond mere compliance to consider broader socio-ethical questions throughout development and deployment. The toolkit was created through a cross-sectoral collaboration between an academic team based in the UK and an industry team in Italy. We outline the background and rationale for creating a pro-justice AI Act compliance toolkit, detail the process undertaken to develop it, and describe the collaboration and negotiation efforts that shaped its creation. We aim for the described process to serve as a blueprint for other teams navigating the challenges of academia-industry partnerships and aspiring to produce usable and meaningful AI ethics resources.