AHRC: BRAID DOT Responsible AI Collaborations With US Researchers

Funding to work with US-based researchers to undertake humanities research on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI.

Part of the Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) and the Dangers and Opportunities of Technology (DOT) programmes, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) have partnered to support research that will understand and address the ethical, legal and societal implications of artificial intelligence (AI).

Using humanities approaches, research projects will explore the relationships between AI technologies and society, and the impacts these technologies have. Research must be driven by a humanities approach and cannot include the development of new AI technologies, tools or algorithms.

Research projects should:

• Explore the relationships between AI technologies and society through a humanities lens.
• Have at least 51% of their remit within AHRC.

Projects should focus on one or more of the following areas:

• Public media and discourse, including AI impacts on information access and polarisation , journalistic integrity, veracity and authenticity of content and sources, trust in media, capacity for public deliberation and consensus, and platform accountability.
• Resilience and sustainability, particularly AI’s impact on environmental sustainability but including social sustainability, resilience to climate impacts or impacts upon any of the UN’s 17 sustainability goals.
• Law and regulation in relation to AI innovation, including the role of law and regulation in incentivising responsible AI innovation, competing models and approaches to AI regulation, and impacts of AI on the regulatory environment and role of law, supporting citizen recourse, and models of accountability.

This opportunity focuses on funding knowledge-driven research projects. As such, the UK component of applications to this funding opportunity can include practice-led research, where creative output can be produced or practice undertaken as an integral part of a research process as defined in the AHRC research funding guide.

Possible outputs from projects include:

• Articles.
• Books.
• Digital resources or publications.
• Reports.
• Workshops.

Applicants should demonstrate the added value that cross-national collaboration will make to advancing the research topic by bringing together researchers based in the UK and US. Projects should be integrated but they do not have to be symmetrical. The sums and items requested do not have to be identical on the UK and US sides. However, it is expected that the work packages would be delivered reasonably equally.