Simulating Policy Impacts: Developing a Generative Scenario Writing Method to Evaluate the Perceived Effects of Regulation

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Hauptverfasser: Barnett, Julia, Kieslich, Kimon, Diakopoulos, Nicholas
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Barnett, Julia
Kieslich, Kimon
Diakopoulos, Nicholas
author_facet Barnett, Julia
Kieslich, Kimon
Diakopoulos, Nicholas
contents The rapid advancement of AI technologies yields numerous future impacts on individuals and society. Policymakers are tasked to react quickly and establish policies that mitigate those impacts. However, anticipating the effectiveness of policies is a difficult task, as some impacts might only be observable in the future and respective policies might not be applicable to the future development of AI. In this work we develop a method for using large language models (LLMs) to evaluate the efficacy of a given piece of policy at mitigating specified negative impacts. We do so by using GPT-4 to generate scenarios both pre- and post-introduction of policy and translating these vivid stories into metrics based on human perceptions of impacts. We leverage an already established taxonomy of impacts of generative AI in the media environment to generate a set of scenario pairs both mitigated and non-mitigated by the transparency policy in Article 50 of the EU AI Act. We then run a user study (n=234) to evaluate these scenarios across four risk-assessment dimensions: severity, plausibility, magnitude, and specificity to vulnerable populations. We find that this transparency legislation is perceived to be effective at mitigating harms in areas such as labor and well-being, but largely ineffective in areas such as social cohesion and security. Through this case study we demonstrate the efficacy of our method as a tool to iterate on the effectiveness of policy for mitigating various negative impacts. We expect this method to be useful to researchers or other stakeholders who want to brainstorm the potential utility of different pieces of policy or other mitigation strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_09679
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simulating Policy Impacts: Developing a Generative Scenario Writing Method to Evaluate the Perceived Effects of Regulation
Barnett, Julia
Kieslich, Kimon
Diakopoulos, Nicholas
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The rapid advancement of AI technologies yields numerous future impacts on individuals and society. Policymakers are tasked to react quickly and establish policies that mitigate those impacts. However, anticipating the effectiveness of policies is a difficult task, as some impacts might only be observable in the future and respective policies might not be applicable to the future development of AI. In this work we develop a method for using large language models (LLMs) to evaluate the efficacy of a given piece of policy at mitigating specified negative impacts. We do so by using GPT-4 to generate scenarios both pre- and post-introduction of policy and translating these vivid stories into metrics based on human perceptions of impacts. We leverage an already established taxonomy of impacts of generative AI in the media environment to generate a set of scenario pairs both mitigated and non-mitigated by the transparency policy in Article 50 of the EU AI Act. We then run a user study (n=234) to evaluate these scenarios across four risk-assessment dimensions: severity, plausibility, magnitude, and specificity to vulnerable populations. We find that this transparency legislation is perceived to be effective at mitigating harms in areas such as labor and well-being, but largely ineffective in areas such as social cohesion and security. Through this case study we demonstrate the efficacy of our method as a tool to iterate on the effectiveness of policy for mitigating various negative impacts. We expect this method to be useful to researchers or other stakeholders who want to brainstorm the potential utility of different pieces of policy or other mitigation strategies.
title Simulating Policy Impacts: Developing a Generative Scenario Writing Method to Evaluate the Perceived Effects of Regulation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.09679