Reflections on Putting AI Ethics into Practice: How Three AI Ethics Approaches Conceptualize Theory and Practice

Ádám Nagy Hannah Hilligoss Nele Achten + 2 lainnya

15 Januari 2020

The rapid spread of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has precipitated a rise in ethical and human rights-based frameworks intended to guide the development and use of these technologies. Despite the proliferation of these "AI principles," there has been little scholarly focus on understanding these efforts either individually or as contextualized within an expanding universe of principles with discernible trends. To that end, this white paper and its associated data visualization compare the contents of thirty-six prominent AI principles documents side-by-side. This effort uncovered a growing consensus around eight key thematic trends: privacy, accountability, safety and security, transparency and explainability, fairness and non-discrimination, human control of technology, professional responsibility, and promotion of human values. Underlying this “normative core,” our analysis examined the forty-seven individual principles that make up the themes, detailing notable similarities and differences in interpretation found across the documents. In sharing these observations, it is our hope that policymakers, advocates, scholars, and others working to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of AI will be better positioned to build on existing efforts and to push the fractured, global conversation on the future of AI toward consensus.

Bifei Mao Zeqi Zhang X. Yao + 1 lainnya

1 Agustus 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) has profoundly changed and will continue to change our lives. AI is being applied in more and more fields and scenarios such as autonomous driving, medical care, media, finance, industrial robots, and internet services. The widespread application of AI and its deep integration with the economy and society have improved efficiency and produced benefits. At the same time, it will inevitably impact the existing social order and raise ethical concerns. Ethical issues, such as privacy leakage, discrimination, unemployment, and security risks, brought about by AI systems have caused great trouble to people. Therefore, AI ethics, which is a field related to the study of ethical issues in AI, has become not only an important research topic in academia, but also an important topic of common concern for individuals, organizations, countries, and society. This article will give a comprehensive overview of this field by summarizing and analyzing the ethical risks and issues raised by AI, ethical guidelines and principles issued by different organizations, approaches for addressing ethical issues in AI, and methods for evaluating the ethics of AI. Additionally, challenges in implementing ethics in AI and some future perspectives are pointed out. We hope our work will provide a systematic and comprehensive overview of AI ethics for researchers and practitioners in this field, especially the beginners of this research discipline.

Ruth Müller Sami Haddadin A. Buyx + 3 lainnya

26 Januari 2022

The emergence of ethical concerns surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) has led to an explosion of high-level ethical principles being published by a wide range of public and private organizations. However, there is a need to consider how AI developers can be practically assisted to anticipate, identify and address ethical issues regarding AI technologies. This is particularly important in the development of AI intended for healthcare settings, where applications will often interact directly with patients in various states of vulnerability. In this paper, we propose that an ‘embedded ethics’ approach, in which ethicists and developers together address ethical issues via an iterative and continuous process from the outset of development, could be an effective means of integrating robust ethical considerations into the practical development of medical AI.

I. van de Poel Steven Umbrello

1 Februari 2021

Value sensitive design (VSD) is an established method for integrating values into technical design. It has been applied to different technologies and, more recently, to artificial intelligence (AI). We argue that AI poses a number of challenges specific to VSD that require a somewhat modified VSD approach. Machine learning (ML), in particular, poses two challenges. First, humans may not understand how an AI system learns certain things. This requires paying attention to values such as transparency, explicability, and accountability. Second, ML may lead to AI systems adapting in ways that ‘disembody’ the values embedded in them. To address this, we propose a threefold modified VSD approach: (1) integrating a known set of VSD principles (AI4SG) as design norms from which more specific design requirements can be derived; (2) distinguishing between values that are promoted and respected by the design to ensure outcomes that not only do no harm but also contribute to good, and (3) extending the VSD process to encompass the whole life cycle of an AI technology to monitor unintended value consequences and redesign as needed. We illustrate our VSD for AI approach with an example use case of a SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing app.

M. Taddeo Claudio Novelli Luciano Floridi

7 Februari 2023

Accountability is a cornerstone of the governance of artificial intelligence (AI). However, it is often defined too imprecisely because its multifaceted nature and the sociotechnical structure of AI systems imply a variety of values, practices, and measures to which accountability in AI can refer. We address this lack of clarity by defining accountability in terms of answerability, identifying three conditions of possibility (authority recognition, interrogation, and limitation of power), and an architecture of seven features (context, range, agent, forum, standards, process, and implications). We analyze this architecture through four accountability goals (compliance, report, oversight, and enforcement). We argue that these goals are often complementary and that policy-makers emphasize or prioritize some over others depending on the proactive or reactive use of accountability and the missions of AI governance.