AI Thinking: a framework for rethinking artificial intelligence in practice

New research published by RoRI Research Fellow Denis Newman-Griffis in Royal Society Open Science presents a new framework to help understand the decisions and considerations that go into AI use in practice.

How do we actually go about using AI in practice? What kinds of skills does that involve, and how do we help support people and teams to go about using AI in an effective and responsible way?

The “AI Thinking” framework helps to answer these questions. It identifies five key competencies in using AI in practice, and presents the kinds of decisions and skills that go into the everyday use of AI across different contexts.

Denis Newman-Griffis leads RoRI’s GRAIL project, which explores good principles and practices for ethically and effectively using AI and machine learning (ML) in the research funding ecosystem.

Denis told the Royal Society:

AI has really blown up in the last couple of years since the launch of consumer-facing generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini. But the way that we think and talk about AI is still based on a model of technical expertise: that only computer scientists and big tech firms have the ability to understand AI and shape how it works, and that using AI is about having the right computing and data infrastructure.

This paper shows that there is much more to using AI in practice than just the technology itself, and illustrates some of the key competencies and kinds of decisions that make AI use effective and ethical—or not. 

Read the full paper, AI Thinking: a framework for rethinking artificial intelligence in practice.