The rush to deploy powerful new generative AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, has raised alarms about potential harm and misuse. The law’s glacial response to such threats has prompted demands that the companies developing these technologies implement AI “ethically.”
But what, exactly, does that mean?
The straightforward answer would be to align a business’s operations with one or more of the dozens of sets of AI ethics principles that governments, multistakeholder groups and academics have produced. But that is easier said than done.
We and our colleagues spent two years interviewing and surveying AI ethics professionals across a range of sectors to try to understand how they sought to achieve ethical AI—and what they might be missing. We learned that pursuing AI ethics on the ground is less about mapping ethical principles onto corporate actions than it is about implementing management structures and processes that enable an organization to spot and mitigate threats.