The emperor is naked

Abstract

With AI permeating our lives, there is widespread concern regarding the proper framework needed to morally assess and regulate it. This has given rise to many attempts to devise ethical guidelines that infuse guidance for both AI development and deployment. Our main concern is that, instead of a genuine ethical interest for AI, we are witnessing moral diplomacies resulting in moral bureaucracies battling for moral supremacy and political domination. After providing a short overview of what we term ‘ethics washing’ in the AI industry, we analyze the 2021 UNESCO Intergovernmental Meeting of Experts (Category II) tasked with drafting the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and show why the term ‘moral diplomacy’ is better suited to explain what is happening in the field of the ethics of AI. Our paper ends with some general considerations regarding the future of the ethics of AI.

The (Business) Ethics of Ai Regulation

“…Others have made a similar point, highlighting the gap between the perceived commitments from the codes of ethics and other similar documents, and their real intent and decisions or actions in real life (Bietti, 2020;Peukert and Kloker 2020;Vică et al, 2021). As a result, some have argued that "AI ethics" might be nothing more than a buzzword (Vică et al, 2021). However, what is clear is that the reason mentioned above, alongside many others, gave an incentive to different governing bodies, private sectors and academia to develop AI moral principles.…”

“…The purpose of this instrumentalization of AI ethics was, according to him, pretty simple: they do this in order to "distract the public and to prevent or at least delay effective regulation and policy-making" (Metzinger, 2019). Others have made a similar point, highlighting the gap between the perceived commitments from the codes of ethics and other similar documents, and their real intent and decisions or actions in real life (Bietti, 2020;Peukert and Kloker 2020;Vică et al, 2021). As a result, some have argued that "AI ethics" might be nothing more than a buzzword (Vică et al, 2021).…”

“…While AI tools and solutions have been developed and proposed as tools to help us fix various problems, the selection of examples we provided earlier stands as proof for the fact that "AI technologies have pushed the significance of dual-use to the extreme: whether we think about autonomous weapons, facial recognition technologies or already mundane decision-making software, all of these applications can be used for both good and bad purposes" (Vică et al, 2021). Even if the definition of what counts as dual-use (be it research, technologies or artifacts) raises some interesting philosophical questions (Forge, 2010), we consider that the idea that research in AI, the deployment of AI systems, or the use of AI artifacts raises dual-use types of issues is beyond any reasonable doubt.…”

“…In fact, it is specifically because so many people have raised this issue that, lately, there has been a flurry of proposals for integrating AI ethics both at a national and international level, but also within business organizations. Since we are skeptical that moral diplomacies can prove a workable solution for AI ethics (Vică et al, 2021), we turn to exploring the way in which companies try to self-regulate their own AI research and deployment by compiling codes of ethics. The next section of this paper is dedicated to an overview of these self-regulatory attempts, with a focus on what some in the academic literature have labeled "ethics washing".…”

AI and the resurrection of Technological Determinism

“…There are, of course, other theories as to explain the sudden surge in AI ethics, like the extension of Politics to regulation (Gyulai and Ujlaki 2021), or simple "ethics washing"(Vică et al 2021).…”