AI ethics should not remain toothless! A call to bring back the teeth of ethics

Abstract

Ethics has powerful teeth, but these are barely being used in the ethics of AI today – it is no wonder the ethics of AI is then blamed for having no teeth. This article argues that ‘ethics’ in the current AI ethics field is largely ineffective, trapped in an ‘ethical principles’ approach and as such particularly prone to manipulation, especially by industry actors. Using ethics as a substitute for law risks its abuse and misuse. This significantly limits what ethics can achieve and is a great loss to the AI field and its impacts on individuals and society. This article discusses these risks and then highlights the teeth of ethics and the essential value they can – and should – bring to AI ethics now.

Actionable Principles for Artificial Intelligence Policy: Three Pathways

“…Nonetheless, a significant subset of AI Ethics Principles are addressed to governmental actors, from the 2019 OECD Principles on AI (OECD 2019 ) to the US Defence Innovation Board’s AI Principles adopted by the Department of Defence (DIB 2019 ). Without focussing on any single effort in particular, the aggregate success of many AI Ethics Principles remains limited (Rességuier and Rodriques 2020 ). Clear shifts in governmental policy which can be directly traced back to preceding and corresponding sets of AI Ethics Principles, remain few and far between.…”

Community-in-the-loop: towards pluralistic value creation in AI, or—why AI needs business ethics

“…Fourth, the principle-focused approach of AI ethics faces problems in its practical implementation, on the one hand with regard to the necessary operationalisation of general principles, and on the other hand, in terms of accountability and guaranteeing the intended effects [7,10,29]. And finally, the unclear relationship between AI ethics and the legal regulation of AI is criticised, which, among other things, leads to AI ethics being misused by powerful corporations to prevent or at least delay legal action [7,29,66,67]. In the following, we discuss these five shortcomings and their relevance to the field of AI ethics.…”

“…The point is that due to its narrow focus AI ethics does not include an integral part of AI systems as developed and employed in society without considering business models, business practices, their potential wider impacts and the general societal context which they are part of. The ultimate danger here is for AI ethics to become ineffective and powerless [66,67,82]. In response to this shortcoming, the challenge is, therefore, to expand AI ethics in such a way that the use and integration of AI systems in business practices and the necessary negotiation of legitimate (optimisation) goals and trade-offs can also adequately be taken into account.…”

“…Although the concern is closely linked to the economic power of many large corporations, the often conceptually ambiguous relationship of AI ethics to pivotal legal issues, such as the impact of AI on existing legislation or the need for further legal regulation, contributes to this concern. Rességuier and Rodrigues [66] argue that this is due to an underlying law conception of ethics which misunderstands the role of ethical principles and thus risks the practical effectiveness of AI ethics. Beyond mere virtual signalling, the ambiguous use of "ethics" on a communicative level may be tactically exploited to influence the public debate and prospective legislation.…”

“…Moreover, even at the political level, the relationship between ethics and law sometimes seems to be unclear in the context of AI [89], which may become problematic in view of the time delay in legislative processes reacting to rapid technological developments such as AI [61]. Although the danger of "ethics washing" thus seems reasonable [6,10,61,[63][64][65][66][67], it is important to note that from a conceptual perspective the relationship of ethics to questions of legal regulation can be considered complementary in principle [90]. In contrast to legal legislation, ethics is particularly helpful when legislation is unavailable, requires ethical interpretation or counterbalance, or when something that is (still) legal should be avoided for ethical reasons, or something not yet legally required should be done for ethical reasons [82].…”