Fairness of Artificial Intelligence (AI) decisions has become a big challenge for governments, companies, and societies. We offer a theoretical contribution to consider AI ethics outside of high-level and top-down approaches, based on the distinction between “reality” and “world” from Luc Boltanski. To do so, we provide a new perspective on the debate on AI fairness and show that criticism of ML unfairness is “realist”, in other words, grounded in an already instituted reality based on demographic categories produced by institutions. Second, we show that the limits of “realist” fairness corrections lead to the elaboration of “radical responses” to fairness, that is, responses that radically change the format of data. Third, we show that fairness correction is shifting to a “domination regime” that absorbs criticism, and we provide some theoretical and practical avenues for further development in AI ethics. Using an ad hoc critical space stabilized by reality tests alongside the algorithm, we build a shared responsibility model which is compatible with the radical response to fairness issues. Finally, this paper shows the fundamental contribution of pragmatic sociology theories, insofar as they afford a social and political perspective on AI ethics by giving an active role to material actors such as database formats on ethical debates. In a context where data are increasingly numerous, granular, and behavioral, it is essential to renew our conception of AI ethics on algorithms in order to establish new models of responsibility for companies that take into account changes in the computing paradigm.
We consider two fundamental and related issues currently faced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) development: the lack of ethics and interpretability of AI decisions. Can interpretable AI decisions help to address ethics in AI? Using a randomized study, we experimentally show that the empirical and liberal turn of the production of explanations tends to select AI explanations with a low denunciatory power. Under certain conditions, interpretability tools are therefore not means but, paradoxically, obstacles to the production of ethical AI since they can give the illusion of being sensitive to ethical incidents. We also show that the denunciatory power of AI explanations is highly dependent on the context in which the explanation takes place, such as the gender or education level of the person to whom the explication is intended for. AI ethics tools are therefore sometimes too flexible and self-regulation through the liberal production of explanations do not seem to be enough to address ethical issues. We then propose two scenarios for the future development of ethical AI: more external regulation or more liberalization of AI explanations. These two opposite paths will play a major role on the future development of ethical AI.
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