Formal Specification, Assessment, and Enforcement of Fairness for Generative AIs

The risk of reinforcing or exacerbating societal biases and inequalities is growing as generative AI increasingly produces content that resembles human output, from text to images and beyond. Here we formally characterize the notion of fairness for generative AI as a basis for monitoring and enforcing fairness. We define two levels of fairness utilizing the concept of infinite words. The first is the fairness demonstrated on the generated sequences, which is only evaluated on the outputs while agnostic to the prompts/models used. The second is the inherent fairness of the generative AI model, which requires that fairness be manifested when input prompts are neutral, that is, they do not explicitly instruct the generative AI to produce a particular type of output. We also study relative intersectional fairness to counteract the combinatorial explosion of fairness when considering multiple categories together with lazy fairness enforcement. Our implemented specification monitoring and enforcement tool shows interesting results when tested against several generative AI models.