The DOI matches its Crossref record; 19 of the 19 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The uselessness of AI ethics
Open accessAbstract
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.
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“The article thus concludes by highlighting alternatives: the first thinks more broadly about AI justice, considering sociopolitical dynamics and systems of oppression [14, 46]; the second thinks more narrowly, focusing on concrete issues like accuracy, auditing, and governance [25, 67].”
BackgroundThe Ethics of AI Ethics: An Evaluation of Guidelines
Hagendorff, T. (2020) · Minds and Machines · doi:10.1007/s11023-020-09517-8 · Cited by 1,911 · cited 3×
“After surveying 22 sets of guidelines, Hagendorff [28] concludes that AI ethics is failing on many levels; they lack any enforcement mechanisms and their values are easily over-written by economic incentives, often becoming little more than marketing devices.”
BackgroundMethodInfluentialThe Ethics of AI Ethics -- An Evaluation of Guidelines
Hagendorff, T. (2019) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1903.03425 · Cited by 1,907 · cited 3×
“After surveying 22 sets of guidelines, Hagendorff [28] concludes that AI ethics is failing on many levels; they lack any enforcement mechanisms and their values are easily over-written by economic incentives, often becoming little more than marketing devices.”
BackgroundMethodInfluentialPrinciples alone cannot guarantee ethical AI
Mittelstadt, B. (2019) · Nature Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1038/s42256-019-0114-4 · Cited by 1,886 · cited 1×
“Mittelstadt [45, p 501] suggests that work on AI ethics has largely produced “vague, high-level principles, and value statements which promise to be action-guiding, but in practice provide few specific recommendations and fail to address fundamental normative and political tensions embedded in key…”
BackgroundA Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society
Floridi, L., & Cowls, J. (2019) · Harvard Data Science Review · doi:10.1162/99608f92.8cd550d1 · Cited by 1,631 · cited 1×
“Despite the mush-rooming of ethical statements, Floridi and Cowls [21] suggest many values recur frequently and can be condensed into five core principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, justice, and explicability.”
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“Even the most influential conceptions of privacy characterize it as a big tent, housing a diverse group of interests and a diverse array of meanings [75].”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Munn, L.
- Venue
- AI and Ethics
- Published
- 2022-08-23
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 869-877
- ISSN
- 2730-5953 (ISSN-L)
- 2730-5961
- OpenAlex
- W4292731246
- Cited by
- 355
- References
- 19
- FWCI
- 73.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- Licence
- creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 (tdm)
- creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 (vor)
- Funders
- Western Sydney University
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