Good Intentions, Risky Inventions: A Method for Assessing the Risks and Benefits of AI in Mobile and Wearable Uses

LLM-based method for identifying risks and benefits for mobile and wearable computing
Overview of our method. A three LLM-prompt pipeline for generating mobile and wearable uses of AI (prompt #1), classifying each use's risks according to the EU AI Act (prompt #2), and determining whether each generated use is beneficial according to the UN's Sustainability Development Goals (prompt #3). Out of 138 generated uses, as many as 80 were considered high risk according to the EU AI Act, primarily aligning with Sustainable Development Goals 3 (good health and well-being), 10 (reduced inequalities), and 16 (peace and justice). Our method was validated by two experts in mobile and wearable technologies, a legal and compliance expert, and a cohort of nine individuals with legal backgrounds who were recruited from Prolific, confirming its accuracy to be over 85%.

Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into mobile and wearable devices offers numerous benefits at individual, societal, and environmental levels. However, AI also raises concerns about emerging risks that require costly expert analysis to understand.

Here, we developed a semi-automatic method that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify AI uses in mobile and wearables, classify their risks based on the EU AI Act, and determine their benefits that align with globally recognized long-term sustainable development goals (SDGs). Our method was manually validated by two experts in mobile and wearable technologies, a legal and compliance expert, and a cohort of nine individuals with legal backgrounds recruited from Prolific, confirming its accuracy to be over 85%.

Our findings reveal that specific applications of mobile computing have significant potential in improving well-being, safety, and social equality. However, these promising uses are associated with risks involving sensitive data, vulnerable groups, and automated decision-making. To avoid rejecting these risky yet impactful mobile and wearable applications, we propose a risk assessment checklist for the Mobile HCI community.

Visualization: demo

Publications

  • Good Intentions, Risky Inventions: A Method for Assessing the Risks and Benefits of AI in Mobile and Wearable Uses. ACM Mobile HCI 2024 PDF
  • The Atlas of AI Incidents in Mobile Computing: Visualizing the Risks and Benefits of AI Gone Mobile. ACM Mobile HCI (demo) 2024 PDF

Code and data


We'll never share your email with anyone else.

N.B.: If you do not receive the instruction message within a few hours, please check your junk/spam e-mail folder just in case the email was moved there.