Understanding AI research ethics as a collective problem

To understand why this matters, we need to examine the traditional ethical gateway, the Institutional Review Board (IRB), which is typically synonymous with'research ethics' in the United States. The primary difference between the ESR and IRBs is that IRBs are expressly disallowed from addressing concerns about harms to society and focus instead on harms to human participants in research only. A large proportion of AI research does not directly engage human subjects, which means many IRBs decline to review AI research, and a significant number of projects never undergoes any ethical review.