Empowering Affected Individuals to Shape AI Fairness Assessments: Processes, Criteria, and Tools

AI systems are increasingly used in high-stakes domains such as credit rating, where fairness concerns are critical. Existing fairness assessments are typically conducted by AI experts or regulators using predefined protected attributes and metrics, which often fail to capture the diversity and nuance of fairness notions held by the individuals who are affected by these systems' decisions, such as decision subjects. Recent work has therefore called for involving affected individuals in fairness assessment, yet little empirical evidence exists on how they create their own fairness criteria or what kinds of criteria they produce - knowledge that could not only inform experts' fairness evaluation and mitigation, but also guide the design of AI assessment tools. We address this gap through a qualitative user study with 18 participants in a credit rating scenario. Participants first articulated their fairness notions in their own words. Then, participants turned them into concrete quantified and operationalized fairness criteria, through an interactive prototype we designed. Our findings provide empirical evidence of the process through which people's fairness notions emerge via grounding in model features, and uncover a diverse set of individuals' custom-defined criteria for both outcome and procedural fairness. We provide design implications for processes and tools that support more inclusive and value-sensitive AI fairness assessment.