AI topics: A responsibility to celebrate AI responsibly

The debut of the Al in the News column elsewhere in this issue of Al Magazine created a good opportunity to introduce the professional community to the Al Topics web site,1home of the Al in the news virtual page.2 Although AI Topics is designed for the lay public, it serves a much larger audience.

After a year of planning, the Al Topics web site went online in 1998 with the goal of providing students, teachers, journalists, and others with a basic understanding of what Al is and what AI scientists do. Much of the genetic code for this web site, however, was actually written when the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) came into existence. In the 1980 President's Message delivered by AAAI's first president, Allen Newell, one finds many of the responsibilities, principles, and protocols that have become part of the very fiber of AAAI. Not surprisingly, some of these elements were inherited (Newell 1980, p. 3):

[W]e are a society born into a community of societies. ... Because being a scientific society has grown to be a rather particular and special thing, it carries with it a rather special set of obligations-not onerous, but pleasant, yet nevertheless real obligations.