Our approach

Human-centered

We adopt a human‑centred approach to AI development and deployment. This is in line with Australia’s AI Ethics Principles and Australia’s commitment to international declarations such as the Bletchley Declaration. A human‑centred approach helps make sure technologies are fit‑for‑purpose while serving humans, respecting individual rights and protecting marginalised groups.

In the context of safe and responsible AI system development and/or deployment, a human‑centred approach means:

  • Protecting people. The implementation practices are designed to help leaders and business owners identify, prevent, minimise and remedy a wide range of AI‑related risk of harm to their organisation and stakeholders, including consumers, employees and the Australian community. In this guidance, the approach towards protecting the safety of people is grounded in respecting human rights. A human‑centred approach to AI upholds Australia’s responsibility to human rights protections. These protections are enshrined in a range of federal and state and territory instruments, the Australian Constitution and the common law.
  • Upholding diversity, inclusion and fairness. The implementation practices are designed to help organisations ensure AI systems serve all people in Australia, regardless of racial background, gender, age, disability status or other attribute.
  • Prioritising people through human‑centred design. Human‑centred design is an approach to technology design, development and/or deployment that recognises and balances human goals, relationships and social contexts with the capabilities and limitations of technical systems (Gasson 2023). This guidance offers practical ways to prioritise the needs of humans in the development and/or deployment of AI systems.
  • Developing and deploying trustworthy AI systems to support social licence. To unlock the greatest possible value from AI, an organisation developing and deploying it must have social licence for its use. This social licence is based on stakeholders believing in the trustworthiness of the AI system. It is only by earning and maintaining the trust of stakeholders that an organisation can be confident it possesses the social licence needed to develop and/or deploy AI systems.

Bias

This guidance defines bias as the ‘systematic difference in the treatment of certain objects, people or groups in comparison to others’. It can be the basis for unfairness, defined as ‘unjustified differential treatment that preferentially benefits certain groups more than others’.

For some use cases, such as healthcare, accounting for gender differences can be essential to understand the risk factors or treatment appropriate for an individual or group. This justifies a differential treatment (Cirillo et al.2020)

Bias becomes problematic or ‘unwanted’ when it results in unfavourable treatment for people or groups. Unfair treatment will also constitute unlawful discrimination in certain areas of public life if that treatment is based on a ‘protected attribute’:

  • age
  • disability
  • race, including colour, national or ethnic origin or immigrant status
  • sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status, marital or relationship status, pregnancy or potential pregnancy, breastfeeding or family responsibilities 

Internationally consistent

Recognising that Australia is an open, trading economy, recommended processes and practices in this guidance are consistent with current international standards and best practice. This supports Australian organisations who operate internationally by aligning Australian practices with other jurisdictions’ expectations. It also aims to avoid creating barriers to international organisations operating in Australia compared to other markets.

The implementation practices draw on and are aligned with a range of international standards and equivalent best practices. Key examples include the ISO standard on AI management systems, AS ISO/IEC 42001:2023, the US NIST AI Risk Management Framework (RMF) 1.0 and its Generative AI Profile.

To see how this guidance aligns to international standards please refer to the crosswalk. Future versions will reflect changes in the international landscape.