The State of AI Ethics Report (Volume 4) (2025)

The State of AI Ethics Report (October 2020)

ArXiv, 2020

The 2nd edition of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute's The State of AI Ethics captures the most relevant developments in the field of AI Ethics since July 2020. This report aims to help anyone, from machine learning experts to human rights activists and policymakers, quickly digest and understand the ever-changing developments in the field. Through research and article summaries, as well as expert commentary, this report distills the research and reporting surrounding various domains related to the ethics of AI, including: AI and society, bias and algorithmic justice, disinformation, humans and AI, labor impacts, privacy, risk, and future of AI ethics. In addition, The State of AI Ethics includes exclusive content written by world-class AI Ethics experts from universities, research institutes, consulting firms, and governments. These experts include: Danit Gal (Tech Advisor, United Nations), Amba Kak (Director of Global Policy and Programs, NYU's AI Now Institute), Rumman Cho...

The State of AI Ethics Report (January 2021)

ArXiv, 2021

The 3rd edition of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute's The State of AI Ethics captures the most relevant developments in AI Ethics since October 2020. It aims to help anyone, from machine learning experts to human rights activists and policymakers, quickly digest and understand the field's ever-changing developments. Through research and article summaries, as well as expert commentary, this report distills the research and reporting surrounding various domains related to the ethics of AI, including: algorithmic injustice, discrimination, ethical AI, labor impacts, misinformation, privacy, risk and security, social media, and more. In addition, The State of AI Ethics includes exclusive content written by world-class AI Ethics experts from universities, research institutes, consulting firms, and governments. Unique to this report is"The Abuse and Misogynoir Playbook,"written by Dr. Katlyn Tuner (Research Scientist, Space Enabled Research Group, MIT), Dr. Danielle Wood...

The State of AI Ethics Report (June 2020)

ArXiv, 2020

These past few months have been especially challenging, and the deployment of technology in ways hitherto untested at an unrivalled pace has left the internet and technology watchers aghast. Artificial intelligence has become the byword for technological progress and is being used in everything from helping us combat the COVID-19 pandemic to nudging our attention in different directions as we all spend increasingly larger amounts of time online. It has never been more important that we keep a sharp eye out on the development of this field and how it is shaping our society and interactions with each other. With this inaugural edition of the State of AI Ethics we hope to bring forward the most important developments that caught our attention at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute this past quarter. Our goal is to help you navigate this ever-evolving field swiftly and allow you and your organization to make informed decisions. This pulse-check for the state of discourse, research, and dev...

AI Ethics: Chosen Challenges for Contemporary Societies and Technological Policymaking

2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly advancing technology that permeates human life at various levels. It evokes hopes for a better, easier, and more exciting life, while also instilling fears about the future without humans. AI has become part of our daily lives, supporting fields such as medicine, customer service, finance, and justice systems; providing entertainment, and driving innovation across diverse fields of knowledge. Some even argue that we have entered the “AI era.” However, AI is not solely a matter of technological progress. We already witness its positive and negative impact on individuals and societies. Hence, it is crucial to examine the primary challenges posed by AI, which is the subject of AI ethics. In this paper, I present the key challenges that emerged in the literature and require ethical reflection. These include the issues of data privacy and security, the problem of AI biases resulting from social, technical, or socio-technical factors, and the challenges associated with using AI for prediction of human behavior (particularly in the context of the justice system). I also discuss existing approaches to AI ethics within the framework of technological regulations and policymaking, presenting concrete ways in which ethics can be implemented in practice. Drawing on the functioning of other scientific and technological fields, such as gene editing, the development of automobile and aviation industries, I highlight the lessons we can learn from how they function to later apply it to how AI is introduced in societies. In the final part of the paper, I analyze two case studies to illustrate the ethical challenges related to recruitment algorithms and risk assessment tools in the criminal justice system. The objective of this work is to contribute to the sustainable development of AI by promoting human-centered, societal, and ethical approaches to its advancement. Such approach seeks to maximize the benefits derived from AI while simultaneously mitigating its diverse negative consequences.

The State of AI Ethics Report (Volume 5)

Cornell University - arXiv, 2021

Go Wide: Article Summaries (summarized by Abhishek Gupta) Ethical AI isn't the same as trustworthy AI, and that matters (Original VentureBeat article by Kimberly Nevala) Google showed us the danger of letting corporations lead AI research (Original QZ article by Nicolás Rivero) If not AI ethicists like Timnit Gebru, who will hold Big Tech accountable? (Original Brookings article by Alex Engler) AI research survey finds machine learning needs a culture change (Original VentureBeat article by Khari Johnson)

AI Ethics and Machine Ethics

Handbook on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Eds. David Gunkel), 97-112 , 2024

This book chapter aims to offer readers insight into the key distinctions between these two fields, specifically in terms of their subject matter, viewpoints, and approaches. Following this introduction, the second section delves into AI ethics, while the third section explores machine ethics. The fourth section offers a synopsis of two important intersecting issues – the moral standing of AI systems and AI ethics in facial recognition technology (as exemplified by China’s Social Credit Point System). The final section provides some concluding remarks.

The Forgotten Margins of AI Ethics

2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

How has recent AI Ethics literature addressed topics such as fairness and justice in the context of continued social and structural power asymmetries? We trace both the historical roots and current landmark work that have been shaping the field and categorize these works under three broad umbrellas: (i) those grounded in Western canonical philosophy, (ii) mathematical and statistical methods, and (iii) those emerging from critical data/algorithm/information studies. We also survey the field and explore emerging trends by examining the rapidly growing body of literature that falls under the broad umbrella of AI Ethics. To that end, we read and annotated peer-reviewed papers published over the past four years in two premier conferences: FAccT and AIES. We organize the literature based on an annotation scheme we developed according to three main dimensions: whether the paper deals with concrete applications, use-cases, and/or people's lived experience; to what extent it addresses harmed, threatened, or otherwise marginalized groups; and if so, whether it explicitly names such groups. We note that although the goals of the majority of FAccT and AIES papers were often commendable, their consideration of the negative impacts of AI on traditionally marginalized groups remained shallow. Taken together, our conceptual analysis and the data from annotated papers indicate that the field would benefit from an increased focus This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: exacerbated problems, renewed problems, unprecedented problems

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping our world. As AI systems become increasingly autonomous and integrated into various sectors, fundamental ethical issues such as accountability, transparency, bias, and privacy are exacerbated or morph into new forms. This introduction provides an overview of the current ethical landscape of AI. It explores the pressing need to address biases in AI systems, protect individual privacy, ensure transparency and accountability, and manage the broader societal impacts of AI on labour markets, education, and social interactions. It also highlights the global nature of AI's challenges, such as its environmental impact and security risks, stressing the importance of international collaboration and culturally sensitive ethical guidelines. It then outlines three unprecedented challenges AI poses to copyright and intellectual property rights; individual autonomy through AI's "hypersuasion"; and our understanding of authenticity, originality, and creativity through the transformative impact of AI-generated content. The conclusion emphasises the importance of ongoing critical vigilance, imaginative conceptual design, and collaborative efforts between diverse stakeholders to deal with the ethical complexities of AI and shape a sustainable and socially preferable future. It underscores the crucial role of philosophy in identifying and analysing the most significant problems and designing convincing and feasible solutions, calling for a new, engaged, and constructive approach to philosophical inquiry in the digital age.

AI Ethics: An Empirical Study on the Views of Practitioners and Lawmakers

Cornell University - arXiv, 2022

Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions and technologies are being increasingly adopted in smart systems context, however, such technologies are continuously concerned with ethical uncertainties. Various guidelines, principles, and regulatory frameworks are designed to ensure that AI technologies bring ethical well-being. However, the implications of AI ethics principles and guidelines are still being debated. To further explore the significance of AI ethics principles and relevant challenges, we conducted a survey of 99 representative AI practitioners and lawmakers (e.g., AI engineers, lawyers) from twenty countries across five continents. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study that encapsulates the perceptions of two different types of population (AI practitioners and lawmakers) and the study findings confirm that transparency, accountability, and privacy are the most critical AI ethics principles. On the other hand, lack of ethical knowledge, no legal frameworks, and lacking monitoring bodies are found the most common AI ethics challenges. The impact analysis of the challenges across AI ethics principles reveals that conflict in practice is a highly severe challenge. Moreover, the perceptions of practitioners and lawmakers are statistically correlated with significant differences for particular principles (e.g. fairness, freedom) and challenges (e.g. lacking monitoring bodies, machine distortion). Our findings stimulate further research, especially empowering existing capability maturity models to support the development and quality assessment of ethics-aware AI systems.

IJERT-Ethics in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

International Journal of Engineering Research and Technology (IJERT), 2020

https://www.ijert.org/ethics-in-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning https://www.ijert.org/research/ethics-in-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-IJERTCONV8IS05055.pdf Artificial Intelligence (AI), a field of computer science enabling computers to be better than humans at traditionally human tasks, is a developing field and hence it is of utmost importance to establish a guideline for ethical practices going forward. It can be used ethically to maximize quality of life in every aspect such as health-care, transport and city planning. However, unethically, it can be used to gather data and spy on individuals violating their personal space, as an enabler of an Orwellian state and as a means of war. Action needs to be taken now to ensure AI is used ethically. We describe some ethical and unethical uses cases and propose some laws and regulations to ensure ethical use of AI in the future.