AI Ecosystem
Defining your role within the 'AI ecosystem' is important, since we all have a role to play not only in the progression of innovation but also in the governance and application of Artificial Intelligent Systems within our day-to-day lives.
What is an AI System?
According to the EU AI Act (Article 3) : 'An AI System means a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment, and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments'
And based on ISO/IEC 22989_2022 of AI Terminology : 'artificial intelligence system AI system engineered system that generates outputs such as content, forecasts, recommendations, or decisions for a given set of human-defined objectives' and expanded further in ISO/IEC 42001_2023 to include 'automatic decision making'.
In summary, it is the ability for these models (systems) to respond to human input, infer and act with a certain level of autonomy that differentiates them from more traditional machine learning models.
Why is my role as a user of AI important?
Despite attempts to regulate and have Providers and Deployers of AI Systems adhere to a common set of standards (see AI Management System Framework), as an end user, you need to demand transparency and a clearer understanding of how the AI is functioning and how it uses your inputs to generate it's responses. Users (and this is pretty much all of us) need to be encouraged to share our feedback in order to ensure constant improvements. Also if we feel the output is offering any bias or misinformation, that this is flagged and corrected. We are now part of the feedback loop!
Roles and definitions
The most important roles within the ecosystem are that of the Provider, Deployer and the end user (defined above). The EU AI Act defines the following:
AI System Provider : a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body that develops an AI system or a general purpose AI model (or that has an AI system or a general purpose AI model developed) and places them on the market or puts the system into service under its own name or trademark, whether for payment or free of charge. Note here : that the EU AIA does not have a role defined as 'AI Producer' but instead broadens the regulatory responsibilities assigned to the Provider.
AI System Deployer : any natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body using an AI system under its authority except where the AI system is used in the course of a personal non-professional activity.
AI System Producer (ISO/IEC Standards) : the term is used to describe entities involved in creating AI systems. Producers are primarily responsible for designing and testing AI systems as part of their development lifecycle. They focus on technical aspects like functionality, performance, and security while adhering to ethical principles.
AI Ecosystem chart : What is my role?
