What is AI ethics?

This article aims to provide a comprehensive market view of AI ethics in

the industry today. To learn more about IBM’s point of view, see our AI
ethics page here.

Ethics is a set of moral principles which help us discern between right and
wrong. AI ethics is a multidisciplinary field that studies how to optimize
AI's beneficial impact while reducing risks and adverse outcomes.
Examples of AI ethics issues include data responsibility and privacy,
fairness, explainability, robustness, transparency, environmental
sustainability, inclusion, moral agency, value alignment, accountability,
trust, and technology misuse.

With the emergence of big data, companies have increased their focus to
drive automation and data-driven decision-making across their
organizations. While the intention there is usually, if not always, to
improve business outcomes, companies are experiencing unforeseen
consequences in some of their AI applications, particularly due to poor
upfront research design and biased datasets.

As instances of unfair outcomes have come to light, new guidelines have

emerged, primarily from the research and data science communities, to
address concerns around the ethics of AI. Leading companies in the field
of AI have also taken a vested interest in shaping these guidelines, as
they themselves have started to experience some of the consequences for
failing to uphold ethical standards within their products. Lack of diligence
in this area can result in reputational, regulatory and legal exposure,
resulting in costly penalties. As with all technological advances, innovation
tends to outpace government regulation in new, emerging fields. As the
appropriate expertise develops within the government industry, we can
expect more AI protocols for companies to follow, enabling them to avoid
any infringements on human rights and civil liberties.

What is AI Ethics? (6:10)

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Establishing principles for AI ethics

While rules and protocols develop to manage the use of AI, the academic
community has leveraged the Belmont Report (link resides outside
ibm.com) (PDF, 121 KB) as a means to guide ethics within experimental
research and algorithmic development. There are main three principles
that came out of the Belmont Report that serve as a guide for experiment
and algorithm design, which are:

1. Respect for Persons: This principle recognizes the autonomy of

individuals and upholds an expectation for researchers to protect
individuals with diminished autonomy, which could be due to a
variety of circumstances such as illness, a mental disability, age
restrictions. This principle primarily touches on the idea of consent.
Individuals should be aware of the potential risks and benefits of
any experiment that they’re a part of, and they should be able to
choose to participate or withdraw at any time before and during the
experiment.
2. Beneficence: This principle takes a page out of healthcare ethics,
where doctors take an oath to “do no harm.” This idea can be easily
applied to artificial intelligence where algorithms can amplify biases
around race, gender, political leanings, et cetera, despite the
intention to do good and improve a given system.
3. Justice: This principle deals with issues, such as fairness and
equality. Who should reap the benefits of experimentation and
machine learning? The Belmont Report offers five ways to distribute
burdens and benefits, which are by:
o Equal share
o Individual need
o Individual effort
o Societal contribution
o Merit
Related links
IBM AI Ethics
Five steps to implementing algorithmic safety practices
Primary concerns of AI today
There are a number of issues that are at the
forefront of ethical conversations surrounding AI
technologies in the real world. Some of these
include:
Foundation models and generative AI
The release of ChatGPT in 2022 marked a true inflection point for artificial
intelligence. The abilities of OpenAI’s chatbot — from writing legal briefs
to debugging code — opened a new constellation of possibilities for what
AI can do and how it can be applied across almost all industries. ChatGPT
and similar tools are built on foundation models, AI models that can be
adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks. Foundation models are
typically large-scale generative models, comprised of billions of
parameters, that are trained on unlabeled data using self-supervision. This
allows foundation models to quickly apply what they’ve learned in one
context to another, making them highly adaptable and able to perform a
wide variety of different tasks. Yet there are many potential issues and
ethical concerns around foundation models that are commonly recognized
in the tech industry, such as bias, generation of false content, lack of
explainability, misuse, and societal impact. Many of these issues are
relevant to AI in general but take on new urgency in light of the power and
availability of foundation models.
Technological singularity
While this topic garners a lot of public attention, many researchers are not
concerned with the idea of AI surpassing human intelligence in the near or
immediate future. This is also referred to as superintelligence, which Nick
Bostrum defines as “any intellect that vastly outperforms the best human
brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general
wisdom, and social skills.” Despite the fact that Strong AI and
superintelligence is not imminent in society, the idea of it raises some
interesting questions as we consider the use of autonomous systems, like
self-driving cars. It’s unrealistic to think that a driverless car would never
get into a car accident, but who is responsible and liable under those
circumstances? Should we still pursue autonomous vehicles, or do we limit
the integration of this technology to create only semi-autonomous
vehicles which promote safety among drivers? The jury is still out on this,
but these are the types of ethical debates that are occurring as new,
innovative AI technology develops.
AI impact on jobs
While a lot of public perception around artificial intelligence centers
around job loss, this concern should be probably reframed. With every
disruptive, new technology, we see that the market demand for specific
job roles shift. For example, when we look at the automotive industry,
many manufacturers, like GM, are shifting to focus on electric vehicle
production to align with green initiatives. The energy industry isn’t going
away, but the source of energy is shifting from a fuel economy to an
electric one. Artificial intelligence should be viewed in a similar manner,
where artificial intelligence will shift the demand of jobs to other areas.
There will need to be individuals to help manage these systems as data
grows and changes every day. There will still need to be resources to
address more complex problems within the industries that are most likely
to be affected by job demand shifts, like customer service. The important
aspect of artificial intelligence and its effect on the job market will be
helping individuals transition to these new areas of market demand.
Privacy
Privacy tends to be discussed in the context of data privacy, data
protection and data security, and these concerns have allowed
policymakers to make more strides here in recent years. For example, in
2016, GDPR legislation was created to protect the personal data of people
in the European Union and European Economic Area, giving individuals
more control of their data. In the United States, individual states are
developing policies, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA),
which require businesses to inform consumers about the collection of their
data. This recent legislation has forced companies to rethink how they
store and use personally identifiable data (PII). As a result, investments
within security have become an increasing priority for businesses as they
seek to eliminate any vulnerabilities and opportunities for surveillance,
hacking, and cyberattacks.
Bias and discrimination

Instances of bias and discrimination across a number of intelligent

systems have raised many ethical questions regarding the use of artificial
intelligence. How can we safeguard against bias and discrimination when
the training datasets can lend itself to bias? While companies typically
have well-meaning intentions around their automation
efforts, Reuters (link resides outside ibm.com) highlights some of the
unforeseen consequences of incorporating AI into hiring practices. In their
effort to automate and simplify a process, Amazon unintentionally biased
potential job candidates by gender for open technical roles, and they
ultimately had to scrap the project. As events like these surface, Harvard
Business Review (link resides outside ibm.com) has raised other pointed
questions around the use of AI within hiring practices, such as what
data should you be able to use when evaluating a candidate for a role.

Bias and discrimination aren’t limited to the human resources function

either; it can be found in a number of applications from facial recognition
software to social media algorithms.

As businesses become more aware of the risks with AI, they’ve also
become more active this discussion around AI ethics and values. For
example, last year IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna shared that IBM has sunset
its general purpose IBM facial recognition and analysis products,
emphasizing that “IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any
technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other
vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human
rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our
values and Principles of Trust and Transparency.”
Accountability
There is no universal, overarching legislation that regulates AI practices,
but many countries and states are working to develop and implement
them locally. Some pieces of AI regulation are in place today, with many
more forthcoming. To fill the gap, ethical frameworks have emerged as
part of a collaboration between ethicists and researchers to govern the
construction and distribution of AI models within society. However, at the
moment, these only serve to guide, and research (link resides outside
ibm.com) (PDF, 1 MB) shows that the combination of distributed
responsibility and lack of foresight into potential consequences isn’t
necessarily conducive to preventing harm to society.
How to establish AI ethics

Artificial intelligence performs according to how it

is designed, developed, trained, tuned, and used,
and AI ethics is all about establishing an
ecosystem of ethical standards and guardrails
around throughout all phases of an AI system’s
lifecycle.
Organizations, governments, and researchers
alike have started to assemble frameworks to
address current AI ethical concerns and shape
the future of work within the field. While more
structure is injected into these guidelines every
day, there is some consensus around
incorporating the following:
Governance

Governance is an organization’s act of overseeing the AI lifecycle through

internal policies and processes, staff, and systems. Governance helps to
ensure that AI systems are operating as an organization’s principles and
values intend, as stakeholders expect, and as required by relevant
regulation. A successful governance program will:

 define the roles and responsibilities of people working with AI

 educate all people involved in the AI lifecycle about building AI in a
responsible way
 establish processes for building, managing, monitoring, and
communicating about AI and AI risks
 leverage tools to improve AI’s performance and trustworthiness
throughout the AI lifecycle
An AI Ethics Board is a particularly effective governance mechanism. At
IBM, the AI Ethics Board is comprised of diverse leaders from across the
business. It provides a centralized governance, review, and decision-
making process for IBM ethics policies and practices. Learn more about
IBM’s AI Ethics Board.
Principles and focus areas

An organization’s approach to AI ethics can be guided by principles that

can be applied to products, policies, processes, and practices throughout
the organization to help enable trustworthy AI. These principles should be
structured around and supported by focus areas, such as explainability or
fairness, around which standards can be developed and practices can be
aligned.

When AI is built with ethics at the core, it is capable of tremendous

potential to impact society for good. We’ve started to see this in its
integration into areas of healthcare, such as radiology. The conversation
around AI ethics is also important to appropriately assess and mitigate
possible risks related to AI’s uses, beginning the design phase.
Organizations that promote AI ethics

Since ethical standards are not the primary concern of data engineers and
data scientists in the private sector, a number of organizations have
emerged to promote ethical conduct in the field of artificial intelligence.
For those seeking more information, the following organizations and
projects provide resources for enacting AI ethics:

 AlgorithmWatch: This non-profit focuses on an explainable and

traceable algorithm and decision process in AI programs.
Click here (link resides outside ibm.com) to learn more.
 AI Now Institute: This non-profit at New York University
researches the social implications of artificial intelligence.
Click here (link resides outside ibm.com) to learn more.
 DARPA: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (link
resides outside ibm.com) by the US Department of Defense focuses
on promoting explainable AI and AI research.
 CHAI: The Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (link
resides outside ibm.com) is a cooperation of various institutes and
universities to promote trustworthy AI and provable beneficial
systems.
 NASCAI: The National Security Commission on Artificial
Intelligence (link resides outside ibm.com) is an independent
commission “that considers the methods and means necessary to
advance the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning
and associated technologies to comprehensively address the
national security and defense needs of the United States.”
IBM’s point of view on AI Ethics

IBM has also established its own point of view on AI ethics,

creating Principles of Trust and Transparency to help clients understand
where its values lie within the conversation around AI. IBM has three core
principles that dictate its approach to data and AI development, which
are:

1. The purpose of AI is to augment human intelligence. This

means that we do not seek to replace human intelligence with AI,
but support it. Since every new technological innovation involves
changes to the supply and demand of particular job roles, IBM is
committed to supporting workers in this transition by investing in
global initiatives to promote skills training around this technology.
2. Data and insights belong to their creator. IBM clients can rest
assured that they, and they alone, own their data. IBM has not and
will not provide government access to client data for any
surveillance programs, and it remains committed to protecting the
privacy of its clients.
 3. AI systems must be transparent and explainable. IBM believes
that technology companies need to be clear about who trains their
AI systems, what data was used in that training and, most
importantly, what went into their algorithms’ recommendations.

IBM has also developed five pillars to guide the responsible adoption of AI
technologies. These include:

 Explainability: An AI system should be transparent, particularly

about what went into its algorithm’s recommendations, as relevant
to a variety of stakeholders with a variety of objectives.
 Fairness: This refers to the equitable treatment of individuals, or
groups of individuals, by an AI system. When properly calibrated, AI
can assist humans in making fairer choices, countering human
biases, and promoting inclusivity.
 Robustness: AI-powered systems must be actively defended from
adversarial attacks, minimizing security risks and enabling
confidence in system outcomes.
 Transparency: To reinforce trust, users must be able to see how
the service works, evaluate its functionality, and comprehend its
strengths and limitations.
 Privacy: AI systems must prioritize and safeguard consumers’
privacy and data rights and provide explicit assurances to users
about how their personal data will be used and protected.

These principles and focus areas form the foundation of our approach to
AI ethics. To learn more about IBM’s views around ethics and artificial
intelligence, read more here.