Building Ethics into Artificial Intelligence
Open accessAbstract
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly ubiquitous, the topic of AI governance for ethical decision-making by AI has captured public imagination. Within the AI research community, this topic remains less familiar to many researchers. In this paper, we complement existing surveys, which largely focused on the psychological, social and legal discussions of the topic, with an analysis of recent advances in technical solutions for AI governance. By reviewing publications in leading AI conferences including AAAI, AAMAS, ECAI and IJCAI, we propose a taxonomy which divides the field into four areas: 1) exploring ethical dilemmas; 2) individual ethical decision frameworks; 3) collective ethical decision frameworks; and 4) ethics in human-AI interactions. We highlight the intuitions and key techniques used in each approach, and discuss promising future research directions towards successful integration of ethical AI systems into human societies.
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Within computer science, there is a growing overlap with Digital Ethics and Trustworthy AI, with a focus on fairness, accountability, transparency and explainability.
“Within computer science, there is a growing overlap with the broader Digital Ethics [19] and the ethics and engineering focused on developing Trustworthy AI [11]. There is a focus on fairness, accountability, transparency and explainability [33, 82–84].”
From Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd): a high-level academic and industry note 2021 (2022) · cites this paper as [82]
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References 59 · Cited by 210
Research works printed but not linked: 12
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- Authors
- Yu, H., Shen, Z., Miao, C., Leung, C., Lesser, V. R., & Yang, Q.
- Affiliations
- Nanyang Technological University (SG)
- University of British Columbia (CA)
- University of Massachusetts Amherst (US)
- Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HK)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Published
- 2018-07
- Pages
- 5527-5533
- OpenAlex
- W2823329128
- Cited by
- 210
- References
- 59
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 28 · 2023: 43 · 2022: 29 · 2021: 30 · 2020: 30 · 2019: 24 · 2018: 2 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 38.65
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publishedVersion)
- Rare & Special e-Zone (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) (submittedVersion)
- DR-NTU (Nanyang Technological University) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Research Foundation
- National Research Foundation Singapore
- Nanyang Technological University (Tier 1)
- Peking University
- Ng Teng Fong Charitable Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Ethics in Business and Education
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
- Keywords
- AI ethics, AI governance, ethical decision-making, ethical dilemmas, human-AI interaction
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