loading page

AI Ethics in the Public, Private, and NGO Sectors: A Review of a Global Document Collection
  • +1
  • Daniel Schiff ,
  • Jason Borenstein ,
  • Justin Biddle ,
  • Kelly Laas
Daniel Schiff
Georgia Institute of Technology

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

Author Profile
Jason Borenstein
Author Profile
Justin Biddle
Author Profile
Kelly Laas
Author Profile

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. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.]