On the Governance of Artificial Intelligence through Ethics Guidelines

Abstract

This article uses a socio-legal perspective to analyze the use of ethics guidelines as a governance tool in the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI). This has become a central policy area in several large jurisdictions, including China and Japan, as well as the EU, focused on here. Particular emphasis in this article is placed on the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI published by the EU Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence in April 2019, as well as the White Paper on AI, published by the EU Commission in February 2020. The guidelines are reflected against partially overlapping and already-existing legislation as well as the ephemeral concept construct surrounding AI as such. The article concludes by pointing to (1) the challenges of a temporal discrepancy between technological and legal change, (2) the need for moving from principle to process in the governance of AI, and (3) the multidisciplinary needs in the study of contemporary applications of data-dependent AI.

Talking AI into Being: The Narratives and Imaginaries of National AI Strategies and Their Performative Politics

“…This literature analyses regulatory measures and investments, foregrounding ethics as a normative framework (Jobin, Ienca, and Vayena 2019). While this rise of ethical guidelines certainly constitutes a strategic move by the corporate sector to escape actual regulation (Wagner 2018), it also functions as a tool for governance, at least by shaping the very understanding of AI and its normative challenges (Larsson 2020).…”

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

“…But also more governance-oriented approaches to the practical implementation of ethical AI play an important part, for example with regard to a professional code of conduct for developers [48,49], a more direct involvement of ethicists in the development of AI systems [50,51], or in terms of checklists [52,53], adapted internal structures [54], suitable impact assessment frameworks [55] and auditing processes [56] or a value-based AI label [57]. Finally, perspectives from the law concern the ethical design of AI at the interface with regulatory issues [58][59][60][61][62]. In summary, Morley et al [63] provide a comprehensive overview of a variety of approaches and tools for the integration of ethical aspects in the development of AI systems.…”

“…On a social, political, legal, governance or corporate culture level, the field of possible measures and methods of implementation appears to be much more diverse-and hence much more complicated. The abstract formulation of ethical principles thus leads to the considerable difficulty of developing and implementing approaches for their practical implementation [9,29,30,62,63,82], not least on a legal level [61]. Besides suitable tools and measures, this also applies to the definition of responsible actors and accountability structures that ensure that the principles are complied with at all [7,29].…”

“…An undefined relation of ethics and law thus risks AI ethics being misused to soften, delay or prevent hard legal regulations [7,10,29,62,64,89]. 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].…”

“…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].…”