Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fast turning into a reality and is laying its hands on every part of life, from health care and education to finance and transportation. With AI systems being developed as more complex and pervasive, it is important to ensure that the development and deployment go through a strong and effective ethical approach.
This could have been avoided because it may lead to unintended consequences, from bias and discrimination to violations of privacy and other bad outcomes for people, businesses, and society.
This post will set the importance of carrying out AI with ethics, key issues related to fairness, accountability, transparency, and privacy, and then dive into the outcomes that can result from unethical AI.
Equity and Non-discrimination
Fairness and non-discrimination are perhaps the most pressing concerns within AI ethics. AI systems are fair only to the extent that the data they are trained upon is fair.
If the data conveys historical biases or does not thoroughly represent some people, the trained AI might amplify or reproduce these. As a result, it can lead to partial treatments among individuals with different characteristics, such as race, gender, age, or socio-economic status.
For instance, an AI-based hiring system, when trained on past data, might start preferring a male candidate over a female candidate, or an AI-based credit scoring system might engage in discriminatory behavior with some ethnic groups based on past lending behavior.
AI developers should carefully curate their training data, test their models for bias, and implement means of detecting and reducing unfair outcomes to ensure fairness and non-discrimination.
Accountability and Transparency
More importantly in AI ethics is another key issue: accountability and transparency. When AI systems increase both complexity and autonomy, the way decisions are arrived at can be hard to explain, or after it goes south, who is to blame may be hard to pinpoint.
Lack of transparency and accountability in the development and deployment of AI erodes public trust in it and makes it difficult to pin problems caused by the systems on developers and deployers.
Addressing these concerns, developers of AI must attend to the transparency and interpretability of models, in particular the provision of clear documentation regarding how their systems work and how decisions are made.
They may also need to establish clear lines of accountability by setting processes for auditing and monitoring those systems to ensure that they work according to design, which could entail working jointly with independent third-party auditors or developing internal ethics boards to oversee AI development and deployment.
Data Privacy and Security
Privacy and data protection are other key elements in the development and deployment of AI since AI systems will often work with vast amounts of personal data to train models and make decisions.
If the information is not secure, or if people do not have sufficient control over how their data is used, it can easily result in stark privacy violations and the erosion of trust. Privacy and data security require stringent practices for data governance by developers of AI, including but not limited to the minimization of data, encryption of data, and control of access.
Moreover, individuals should be informed as to what ends their data is being used; there should be an opportunity to opt-out and request their data be deleted.
AI systems should be designed in a “privacy by default” manner, through techniques such as differential privacy and federated learning, to prevent the risk of data leakage or re-identification.
The Effects of AI Non-Ethical Practices
Unethical AI practices could have undesirable consequences.
At the individual level, unfair or discriminatory AI systems could deny people access to essentials such as health care, housing, or employment while subjecting them to unfair surveillance or profiling. At a business level, unethical AI practices can lead to reputational damage, legal liabilities, and consumer trust decline.
On the social level, widespread implementation of such unethical AI systems would only exacerbate existing disparity, undercut democratic values, and corrode social cohesion.
Only then could all these negative outcomes be prevented. Such a process should involve AI developers, policymakers, civil society organizations, and other relevant stakeholders working together to establish clear lines of ethics, regulatory frameworks, and mechanisms for ensuring responsibility in the operation of AI systems.
A Way Forward: Development and Implementation of AI Responsibly
These are challenges and risks of AI ethics, not reasons to despair. Several organizations and individuals are working on developing and advocating responsible practices with AI that account for principles of fairness, accountability, transparency, and privacy.
This is the time to embed the principles in practice and work collectively to live up to the ethical challenges put forth by AI, leverage the power of transformation with this technology, and at the same time, minimize risks and negative impacts.
At ExpertEase AI, we seriously dedicate ourselves to responsible development and deployment of AI. We take ethics and transparency seriously in the design of our platform and work hand in hand with our clients to ensure their AI systems are fair, accountable, and secure.
If you would like to be part of our community in the development and deployment of AI systems following the highest ethical standards, create a free account at ExpertEase AI today.
After you join our platform, you will be given access to tools and resources regarding responsible AI development, bias detection and mitigation, explainability, transparency, and privacy-preserving machine learning. At the same time, become part of a community of people and organizations of the same notion on the advancement of AI ethics and the responsible use of this transformational technology.
Let’s build a future in which AI operates powerfully, innovatively, fairly, accountably, and in a trustworthy manner. So, why wait? Sign up for your free ExpertEase AI account today to be part of a journey in responsible AI design and deployment.
