Our commitment to using AI at Access Social Care
Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are changing the way we work at Access Social Care, whether that’s improving the quality of our written communications, speeding up our tasks or helping us give people the right advice to help them understand their social care rights.
However, we remain responsible for the quality and accuracy of the content we produce. The use of any AI tool should therefore be seen as a supportive mechanism to create value and enable productivity, with the recognition that outputs from generative AI are susceptible to bias, mistakes and misinformation.
AI Working Group
Access Social Care has created an AI Working Group to develop an organisation wide understanding of both AI and AI tools and to ensure all staff have the skills to use them in an appropriate way, with an understanding of the benefits and risks they offer. We acknowledge that the swift pace of technological change necessitates varied approaches to adoption; as such, we are dedicated to providing comprehensive, tailored support to every member of staff, respecting diverse engagement levels and ensuring a collaborative approach to integration.
What do we mean by AI?
When we talk about AI we are referring to the broad field of creating systems that can perform tasks requiring human intelligence, such as learning and problem-solving. Generative AI is a type of AI that creates new content like text, images, and audio based on its training data. In essence, traditional AI analyses data, whereas generative AI generates new data.
Ethical use of AI
All AI-assisted outputs must undergo a human review for factual accuracy, appropriate tone and ethical integrity before use. It is important that we work together to ensure that their use aligns with vision, mission and our values.
Our Vision, Mission and Values
Our Vision: Our goal is for everyone to receive the social care they need and have a right to. Our Mission: Partnering with communities to champion social care justice. Improving lives through rights education, legal advice and training, innovation and data insight.
Our values determine how we work at Access Social Care and that extends to our approach to ai tools, here’s how:
Trustworthy. Trust is a key value at Access Social Care and with the people and communities our work supports. Transparency regarding how we use AI helps to maintain that trust.
Fair. We know generative AI is trained on unbalanced datasets which do not represent all of the communities we serve, and its outputs are susceptible to bias, mistakes and misinformation. Our AI Working Group exists to make staff aware of this bias and recommended tools and prompts to mitigate against this.
Fearless. We are harnessing the power of AI to help us become more productive individually and to create data insight that helps us challenge injustice in the social care system.
Inclusive. AI tools help us to be a more inclusive organisation. We use AI tools to draft Easyread documents and use ai driven website accessibility tools which are driven by ai to help individuals with disabilities or impairments to navigate the information we provide on our websites.
Collaborative. We are working with communities, social care organisations and local authorities to gather data and insight. AI tools help us to identify trends that we can share with these groups to understand how we can serve our communities better
Positive. The insight AI brings to our work is used constructively to progress outcomes for social care.
How we use AI
We use AI to support the work we do, helping people to access advice to enforce their legal rights, and to gather data to challenge and bring about system change.
We encourage staff to use chat clients to help increase their efficiency, under strict guidance
Meetings - We use AI tools to help us summarise meetings we attend with key actions.
Written Communications - We use AI tools to edit written communications to improve their legibility or to summarise information.
Graphics - We create graphics to illustrate information on our website and in our social media. From time to time, we use AI to generate graphical images to better represent the work that we do and the people we serve.
Data Portal - Our Data portal project combines data from a variety of sources and we use AI to explain data trends in simple accessible words, and to help us identify trends within the data to collaborate with our partners to highlight systemic injustices.
Access Ava - In some cases we use AI to help us determine the correct legal guidance information to display in the digital tool. The legal guidance itself is always verified by lawyers.
We use AI to digest documents and provide a way to explore the information within them.
We use AI to get data in pipelines.
We use AI-assisted coding to build software to quickly test new ideas.
AI Is Not Used For:
We never use AI to make final decisions on legal advice or to replace the human element of support and advocacy.
We do not use AI to create photo realistic images.
We do not use AI in our recruitment processes.
We do not use AI to create legal documents.
Protecting data and privacy
Data Security: We commit to using robust security measures, such as encryption and access controls, to protect sensitive information about beneficiaries, donors, and staff.
Confidentiality: Confidential information is never shared with external, public AI tools or LLM models.
Our commitment to fairness and ethics
Mitigating bias and ensuring equity: Our AI Working Group exists within the organisation to regularly audit, approve and veto the AI systems we use at Access Social Care. The group actively seeks to select tools that ensure fairness and prevent discrimination.
Governance and continuous improvement
AI working group has created a regular rollout of training on AI tools to support staff at ASC.
Compliance and Regulation: Access Social care is a legal rights charity and is governed by various regulatory bodies including:
UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act
The Charity Commission
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO)
The Fundraising Regulator and
The Solicitors Regulatory Authority code of conduct.
Ongoing Review
This policy is a "living document" that will be regularly reviewed by the AI Working Group and updated as AI technology evolves and new risks emerge.
Contact
If you have any questions, feedback, or concerns about the use of AI at Access Social Care please contact enquiries@accessocialcare.org.uk.
