AI Ethics in the Public, Private, and NGO Sectors: A Review of a Global
Document Collection
Abstract
In recent years, numerous public, private, and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) have produced documents addressing the ethical
implications of artificial intelligence (AI). These normative documents
include principles, frameworks, and policy strategies that articulate
the ethical concerns, priorities, and associated strategies of leading
organizations and governments around the world. We examined 112 such
documents from 25 countries that were produced between 2016 and the
middle of 2019. While other studies identified some degree of consensus
in such documents, our work highlights meaningful differences across
public, private, and non-governmental organizations. We analyzed each
document in terms of how many of 25 ethical topics were covered and the
depth of discussion for those topics. As compared to documents from
private entities, NGO and public sector documents reflect more ethical
breadth in the number of topics covered, are more engaged with law and
regulation, and are generated through processes that are more
participatory. These findings may reveal differences in underlying
beliefs about an organization’s responsibilities, the relative
importance of relying on experts versus including representatives from
the public, and the tension between prosocial and economic goals.
[This article is an accepted version. The final published version is
available at https://doi.org/10.1109/TTS.2021.3052127. © 2011 IEEE.
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