Ethical Frameworks for AI Aren't Enough

These are just a few of the ill-defined principles commonly listed in ethical frameworks for artificial intelligence (AI), hundreds of which have now been released by organizations ranging from Google to the government of Canada to BMW. As organizations embrace AI with increasing speed, adopting these principles is widely viewed as one of the best ways to ensure AI does not cause unintended harms. Many AI ethical frameworks cannot be clearly implemented in practice, as researchers have consistently demonstrated. Without a dramatic increase in the specificity of existing AI frameworks, there's simply not much technical personnel can do to clearly uphold such high-level guidance. And this, in turn, means that while AI ethics frameworks may make for good marketing campaigns, they all too frequently fail to stop AI from causing the very harms they are meant to prevent.