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The Key to Navigating the Ethical Issues of AI: 7 Key Principles

Ethical Issues of AI

September 27, 2024 - Blog

Artificial intelligence has made significant strides in recent years. From smart diagnosis in healthcare to proactive threat detection in cyber security, AI has transformed even the most complex and high-stakes fields.
While the same algorithm that strengthens AI with this power—to think, make decisions, and predict outcomes—can also perpetuate biases and inaccuracies, leading to unintended consequences. As AI continues to permeate our daily lives, addressing the ethical issues of AI is essential to ensure fairness, safety, and accountability. A Capgemini Research Institute study shows that AI creates ethical issues in 9 out of 10 businesses.
This blog outlines what ethical AI is, how founders, developers, and how organizations can responsibly develop AI.

Why the Ethical Issues of AI Matter?

AI ethics is a set of guidelines or rules that govern the development and use of AI. Its primary goal is to ensure that AI systems are responsible and do not perpetuate biases, discrimination, or harmful societal stereotypes, thereby upholding human rights and values.
These guidelines ensure AI models are transparent, meaning their decisions can be traced back to specific data and algorithms. This makes understanding why an AI made a particular choice easier, fostering trust in AI systems.
There are two main reasons why navigating the ethical Issues of AI are crucial in designing and developing AI models:
1. Explainability of AI models: One of the most common concerns in AI is the issue of the “black box,” where the reasoning behind AI results is unclear. For example, when an AI model makes a decision, prediction, or produces an outcome, it’s essential to understand how and why it reached that conclusion. If the outcome is biased, causes harm, or amplifies societal biases and discrimination, who is responsible? And why did the AI produce that particular result? These questions highlight the critical need for explainability in AI systems. 84% of CEOs agree that for AI models to be trusted, they need to be explainable.
2. Use of high-quality data sets: Another ethical concern in AI is the quality of the data used for training. Data is the lifeblood of AI, and if it isn’t thoroughly vetted, cleansed, and prepared, there’s a high risk of biases and inaccuracies that could be reflected in the AI’s output. It’s also crucial to use a diverse dataset to ensure inclusivity and respect for the values of all users.

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Key Principles of Creating Ethical AI

One of the biggest hurdles in mitigating ethical issues of AI is defining exactly what AI ethics mean and outlining the specific steps required to create a responsible model. The ambiguity surrounding ethical AI principles, definitions, and implementation makes it difficult to determine which guidelines or rules to prioritize.
Many countries have their own set of rules; for instance, the European Union (EU) has a framework that prioritizes accountability, transparency, and protection of individual rights. Singapore and Canada, too, have AI ethics guidelines that focus on accountability, fairness, and human-centric values.
Lastly, UNESCO has a draft of recommendations on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence that highlights the focus on human rights, fairness, diversity, accountability, and transparency.
Here are some of the key principles of creating ethical AI:

1. Explainability and Transparency

A fundamental ethical principle for AI is that models should be transparent about their decision-making processes. This is especially crucial in industries where mistakes can have severe consequences. Companies must be open about the algorithms they use, how they collect and utilize user data, and other relevant factors to maintain transparency.

2. Security

Maintaining security is paramount in a fully digital-first environment, and it’s no different for AI systems. The AI models should first be compliant with industry and standard regulations and ensure that they’re secured against cybercrimes and threats to maintain user privacy and data integrity.

3. Accountability

Imagine an autonomous car carrying three passengers when its brakes suddenly fail. Ahead, there are pedestrians. The car must decide whether to protect its passengers at all costs or attempt to minimize harm to others. Which should it prioritize?
This scenario illustrates a common ethical dilemma faced by AI models. Additionally, AI can exhibit biases, such as unfairly discriminating against individuals during a job interview. In such situations, who should be held responsible? To answer this question, it’s essential to assign accountability to an individual, group, or organization for the ethical use or misuse of AI.

4. Human surveillance

In high-risk industries such as healthcare, banking, or even national defense, where the use of AI is highly compliant and prone to higher risks, human intelligence should be considered in the entire process of AI development to mitigate ethical issues of AI.

5. Fairness

AI systems should be designed to eliminate biases like gender biases or societal prejudices to ensure fairness and inclusivity for all users. These models should be fair to all regardless of race, gender, disability, cultural differences, or other societal biases. This includes all explicit and unconscious biases that could come along with the data used in training AI models.

6. Reliability

AI systems should be reliable so that they operate within defined parameters to produce consistent outputs and predictions to overcome the ethical issues of AI.

7. Privacy

Data is the backbone of AI models, essential both for training during development and for gathering user feedback after the product is launched to enable further iteration. Given the significant amount of user data involved, it is crucial that AI models respect user privacy and personal data. This means providing users with transparency and control over how their data is collected, used, and managed.

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