“Death By A Thousand Taxonomies?”: AI Risk Classification In Practice

Abstract

The harms in which AI is implicated range in nature and scope from unsafe user interactions through to the societal-wide consequences of AI adoption. Classification of the diverse risks of AI is foundational to AI governance: regulators, technology firms, and policymakers need structured accounts of risk upon which to act. Researchers and practitioners have accordingly developed many Sociotechnical Outcome Taxonomies (SOT). This paper presents an empirical study of SOT development and use, drawing on 25 interviews with researchers and practitioners across industry, academia, civil society, and government. We find SOT are weakly integrated into AI governance processes, and identify two features of SOT design and use that explain why. First, the design choices through which SOT produce structured representations of the complex problem space of AI risks tend to be invisible to downstream taxonomy users. Those users treat the resulting categories as exhaustive accounts of risk rather than as interpretive aids. Second, SOT typically enumerate harms without linking them to decision points or actors implicated in their occurrence, leaving accountability difficult to assign. We close with design recommendations for SOT developers and users, and argue realising the potential of SOT requires governance infrastructure that does not yet exist.