Emerging Consensus on ‘Ethical AI’: Human Rights Critique of Stakeholder Guidelines

Abstract

Voluntary guidelines on ‘ethical practices’ have been the response by stakeholders to address the growing concern over harmful social consequences of artificial intelligence and digital technologies. Issued by dozens of actors from industry, government and professional associations, the guidelines are creating a consensus on core standards and principles for ethical design, development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI). Using human rights principles (equality, participation and accountability) and attention to the right to privacy, this paper reviews 15 guidelines preselected to be strongest on human rights, and on global health. We find about half of these ground their guidelines in international human rights law and incorporate the key principles; even these could go further, especially in suggesting ways to operationalize them. Those that adopt the ethics framework are particularly weak in laying out standards for accountability, often focusing on ‘transparency’, and remaining silent on enforceability and participation which would effectively protect the social good. These guidelines mention human rights as a rhetorical device to obscure the absence of enforceable standards and accountability measures, and give their attention to the single right to privacy. These ‘ethics’ guidelines, disproportionately from corporations and other interest groups, are also weak on addressing inequalities and discrimination. We argue that voluntary guidelines are creating a set of de facto norms and re‐interpretation of the term ‘human rights’ for what would be considered ‘ethical’ practice in the field. This exposes an urgent need for action by governments and civil society to develop more rigorous standards and regulatory measures, grounded in international human rights frameworks, capable of holding Big Tech and other powerful actors to account.

Artificial intelligence opportunities and challenges for enterprise management: a review and research hotspot

“…Their main points are shown in Table 1. Some scholars worry that AI technology may bring a series of social problems, such as technological unemployment, privacy leakage, algorithm collusion, algorithm bias and so on [2][3]13,20 . People are also far from fully trusting and collaborating with machines 20 .…”

“…Fukuda-Parr& Gibbons 13 , Etzioni& Etzioni 21 Existing ethical frameworks tend to focus on transparency and privacy rights to mask real vulnerabilities, such as the lack of enforceable standards, accountability and social participation.…”

“…AI is usually applied for some specific tasks or goals, which is defined as a system's ability to correctly interpret and learn from external information 12 . At present, many scholars have made many achievements in the research of AI and enterprise management, mainly focusing on the technical composition of commercial AI, the business ethics of AI and the specific impact of AI on enterprise management [11][12][13] . There are lots of technologies that AI involves, such as neural network, semantic linguistic analysis and similarity measures 14 .…”

“…There are lots of technologies that AI involves, such as neural network, semantic linguistic analysis and similarity measures 14 . Privacy and data protection are the most common ethical issues, but the fairness of the use of big data and the prejudice hidden therein, as well as the risk of machines harming or killing humans, have also aroused widespread concern among scholars 13 . AI may play an important role in corporate management processes, such as human resource management and innovation management decisions, through its powerful computing power to discover which applicant characteristics are associated with better job performance, or through extensive data searches to overcome information processing constraints 11 .…”

Privacy Protection in Using Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare: Chinese Regulation in Comparative Perspective

“…Academic discussions of patient privacy protection in healthcare are ongoing. Studies have explored how group dimensions influence protection mechanisms for privacy interests [ 12 ], the possible costs of data restrictions [ 13 ], and defects in the emerging consensus on “ethical AI” from the perspective of human rights regulations [ 14 ]. However, research focusing on regulatory issues in the Chinese context is rare, and certain issues remain unclear.…”