How AI companies can avoid ethics washing

One of the essential phrases necessary to understand AI in 2019 has to be "ethics washing." Put simply, ethics washing -- also called "ethics theater" -- is the practice of fabricating or exaggerating a company's interest in equitable AI systems that work for everyone. A textbook example for tech giants is when a company promotes "AI for good" initiatives with one hand while selling surveillance capitalism tech to governments and corporate customers with the other. Accusations of ethics washing have been lobbed at the biggest AI companies in the world, as well as startups. The most high-profile example this year may have been Google's external AI ethics panel, which devolved into a PR nightmare and was disbanded after about a week.