  Artificial Intelligence Impact Assessments ("AIIAs"), a family of tools that
provide structured processes to imagine the possible impacts of a proposed AI
system, have become an increasingly popular proposal to govern AI systems.
Recent efforts from government or private-sector organizations have proposed
many diverse instantiations of AIIAs, which take a variety of forms ranging
from open-ended questionnaires to graded score-cards. However, to date that has
been limited evaluation of existing AIIA instruments. We conduct a classroom
study (N = 38) at a large research-intensive university (R1) in an elective
course focused on the societal and ethical implications of AI. We assign
students to different organizational roles (for example, an ML scientist or
product manager) and ask participant teams to complete one of three existing AI
impact assessments for one of two imagined generative AI systems. In our
thematic analysis of participants' responses to pre- and post-activity
questionnaires, we find preliminary evidence that impact assessments can
influence participants' perceptions of the potential risks of generative AI
systems, and the level of responsibility held by AI experts in addressing
potential harm. We also discover a consistent set of limitations shared by
several existing AIIA instruments, which we group into concerns about their
format and content, as well as the feasibility and effectiveness of the
activity in foreseeing and mitigating potential harms. Drawing on the findings
of this study, we provide recommendations for future work on developing and
validating AIIAs.
