The world's experts in artificial intelligence are meeting in Dublin to develop international standards to establish trust and governance in AI systems.

The National Standards Authority of Ireland in association with Trinity College Dublin's ADAPT Centre will host the meeting.

Prof Dave Lewis, Associate Director of the ADAPT Centre, said experts do not have a good answer to the question; can we trust AI?

"It's becoming more and more part of our daily lives, and I don't think our ability to trust and test those systems have caught up with the speed of the technology. We see it performing really well in image recognition, in voice recognition, but we are also starting to occasions when it hasn't worked very well."

There are examples of when artificial intelligence has not worked well. There have been incidents in the streets in the US from automated vehicle testing, that has resulted in injuries and deaths.

There was an interesting case in the UK where the organisation that grants student visas was using a voice recognition system to do the English proficiency tests. Several thousand students were incorrectly denied visas based on faults with the test due to voice recognition rather than problems with their English language skills.

Prof Lewis explained that the problem with AI is based on the data that informs it. "The old adage of 'garbage in, garbage out', is even more true today with AI. If we are not putting the right data into these systems we are going to get problems when we try to deploy them in the real world," he said.

"If it is image recognition based on pictures of people, are we putting in a diverse enough range of pictures? If we are doing voice recognition, have we got the right diversity of gender, of ages, of nationalities, and even accents within the same country?"

These are some of the issues will be discussed at the meeting, including bias in data, whether AI can be robust to external interference, and how processes can be managed and documented.

The first two meetings of world AI experts on standards were in the US and China. Dublin was chosen for the third meeting because it was seen as a neutral venue.

"When we saw they were looking for a new opportunity, the ADAPT Centre and the NSAI volunteered to host it in Dublin. That has been warmly received," Prof Lewis said. "We are hoping we can give a good neutral view, especially a European angle on how we should go about achieving trustworthy AI."