The uselessness of AI ethics

Abstract

As the awareness of AI’s power and danger has risen, the dominant response has been a turn to ethical principles. A flood of AI guidelines and codes of ethics have been released in both the public and private sector in the last several years. However, these are meaningless principles which are contested or incoherent, making them difficult to apply; they are isolated principles situated in an industry and education system which largely ignores ethics; and they are toothless principles which lack consequences and adhere to corporate agendas. For these reasons, I argue that AI ethical principles are useless, failing to mitigate the racial, social, and environmental damages of AI technologies in any meaningful sense. The result is a gap between high-minded principles and technological practice. Even when this gap is acknowledged and principles seek to be “operationalized,” the translation from complex social concepts to technical rulesets is non-trivial. In a zero-sum world, the dominant turn to AI principles is not just fruitless but a dangerous distraction, diverting immense financial and human resources away from potentially more effective activity. I conclude by highlighting alternative approaches to AI justice that go beyond ethical principles: thinking more broadly about systems of oppression and more narrowly about accuracy and auditing.

In defense of ethical guidelines

“…The first form of criticism is that the "principles are highly abstract and ambiguous, becoming incoherent." Munn diagnoses the problem as having to do with conceptual disagreement, which he thinks has the consequences that "Commendable values like 'fairness' and 'privacy' break down when subjected to scrutiny, leading to disparate visions and deeply incompatible goals" [21]. I will start by addressing the difficulty of creating principles based on concepts such as fairness and privacy.…”

“…The solution to the problem of supplying more detailed requirements often depends on the operationalization of specific requirements; that is, making it possible for non-experts (i.e., non-ethicists) to determine whether a requirement is properly satisfied. While Munn discusses operationalizations, he thinks that "operationalizing AI ethics promises to be difficult or even impossible, a daunting challenge underestimated by a technically focused industry and even by ethicists" [21]. However, it is not clear what Munn takes "operationalization" to mean.…”

“…Recently, Luke Munn argued that AI guidelines are useless. Although the title of his paper-"The uselessness of AI ethics"-seems to indicate that it is about AI ethics, his discussion and examples concern what we broadly call ethical guidelines (i.e., including ethical principles, codes of ethics, guidelines, frameworks, and so forth) [21]. 1 In this article, I aim to defend ethical guidelines.…”

Pensamiento de diseño y marcos éticos para la Inteligencia Artificial: una mirada a la participación de las múltiples partes interesadas

“…Sin embargo, a pesar de que los principios éticos pueden establecer ideales normativos, los mismos carecen de mecanismos para hacer cumplir estos valores y principios, toda vez que los principios no son autoejecutables, y no hay sanciones tangibles cuando son violados o amenazados (Munn, 2022). Pocos países han adoptado algún instrumento regulatorio vinculante para la implementación de ia en su territorio.…”

The ethical agency of AI developers

“…Meanwhile, Mittelstadt [8] has argued that principles-based ethics codes are too vague to be practical and they treat complex normative questions as if they have technological answers. More recently, Munn [9] issued a strong criticism of prevailing AI ethics guidance, calling principles-based ethics codes "meaningless" and "toothless".…”