Skip to content

Five practical and ethical guidelines for responsible use of AI at NIOO

By taking these guidelines into consideration, NIOO people work together towards safe and ethical use of AI. You can see them as the 5 “lab rules” for using AI. You are:

Accountable:

  • Human-in-the-lead is the guiding principle for working with AI.

  • Employees retain 100% responsibility for the accuracy, integrity and scientific validity of AI-generated content or analysis.

  • AI cannot be held accountable for actions you have taken.

  • AI tools can never be listed as author on NIOO publications.

  • Adhere to regulations of funding bodies. If they prohibit usage, do not use AI. This endangers the (funding) position of NIOO and KNAW.

Transparent:

  • Clearly state where and for what which (generative) AI has been part of a process, including in publications and (student) reports. Acknowledgement can be done in a statement or in the methods section of a paper/report.

  • Share and publish code and prompts that have been used, as you would with data or scripts. You can also use NIOO AI Library to share useful prompts with colleagues.

  • Follow FAIR and Open Science principles when using AI in sharing and reporting data.

Critical:

  • Work with AI tools that provide best available standards on ethics, research integrity, and Open and FAIR science.

  • Make sure to check output generated by AI for factual accuracy.

  • Check AI-generated output for unintended algorithmic and database biases.

Secure:

  • Mind your data security! Be alert on materials shared with AI. Do not share e.g. sensitive, personal, or ecologically sensitive knowledge and data with third-party cloud-based AI services. Any data uploaded is at risk of being used for training purposes.

  • Check the privacy settings of third-party cloud-based AI tools strictly. E.g. set data sharing/privacy settings to not ‘improve the model for everyone’.

  • Be aware who owns the intellectual property of materials shared with AI. Do not share e.g. unpublished work, data, copyrighted material, application letters or project ideas of others with third-party cloud-based AI.

Aware:

  • Assess the societal impact that your use of AI has. Proactively mitigate unintended biases with respect to equity, justice, representation, et cetera.

  • Be aware of the environmental impact of your use of AI. Do not use AI for things that could be done equally efficiently without.

  • Be conscious of the fact that major LLMs are often trained on copyrighted material.