Journal of Business Ethics

Artificial Intelligence (AI), defined as "a system's ability to interpret external data correctly, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation" (Kaplan and Haenlein 2019, p. 17), is one of the most popular topics across a variety of academic disciplines, industry sectors, and business functions, and widely influences society at large. While many will first think of computational, organizational, or technological issues related to AI, there is an entire set of ethical dimensions triggered by this new era which urgently need to be analyzed, discussed, and reflected upon. As pointed out by Martin and Freeman (2004, p. 353) "business ethicists are uniquely positioned to analyze the relationship between business, technology, and society". There are many examples where inappropriate use of AI has resulted in unethical outcomes and behavior. Examples include image recognition services which make offensive classifications of minorities due to biased algorithms; Microsoft's AI chatbot Tay which became racist and adopted hate speech after only one day; and Amazon's facial recognition technology which simply failed to recognize users with darker skin colors.