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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field that utilizes computing and often, data and statistics, intensively together to solve problems or make predictions. AI has been evolving with literally unbelievable speed over the past few years, and this has led to an increase in social, cultural, industrial, scientific, and governmental concerns about the ethical development and use of AI systems worldwide. The ASA has issued a statement on ethical statistical practice and AI (ASA, 2024), which echoes similar statements from other groups. Here we discuss the support for ethical statistical practice and ethical AI that has been established in long-standing human rights law and ethical practice standards for computing and statistics. There are multiple sources of support for ethical statistical practice and ethical AI deriving from these source documents, which are critical for strengthening the operationalization of the "Statement on Ethical AI for Statistics Practitioners". These resources are explicated for interested readers to utilize to guide their development and use of AI in, and through, their statistical practice., Comment: 10 pages; Preprint of submission to Proceedings of JSM 2024 Portland, OR

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in retail has significantly transformed the industry, enabling more personalized services and efficient operations. However, the rapid implementation of AI technologies raises ethical concerns, particularly regarding consumer privacy and fairness. This study aims to analyze the ethical challenges of AI applications in retail, explore ways retailers can implement AI technologies ethically while remaining competitive, and provide recommendations on ethical AI practices. A descriptive survey design was used to collect data from 300 respondents across major e-commerce platforms. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, including percentages and mean scores. Findings shows a high level of concerns among consumers regarding the amount of personal data collected by AI-driven retail applications, with many expressing a lack of trust in how their data is managed. Also, fairness is another major issue, as a majority believe AI systems do not treat consumers equally, raising concerns about algorithmic bias. It was also found that AI can enhance business competitiveness and efficiency without compromising ethical principles, such as data privacy and fairness. Data privacy and transparency were highlighted as critical areas where retailers need to focus their efforts, indicating a strong demand for stricter data protection protocols and ongoing scrutiny of AI systems. The study concludes that retailers must prioritize transparency, fairness, and data protection when deploying AI systems. The study recommends ensuring transparency in AI processes, conducting regular audits to address biases, incorporating consumer feedback in AI development, and emphasizing consumer data privacy., Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and optimization hold substantial promise for improving the efficiency, reliability, and resilience of engineered systems. Due to the networked nature of many engineered systems, ethically deploying methodologies at this intersection poses challenges that are distinct from other AI settings, thus motivating the development of ethical guidelines tailored to AI-enabled optimization. This paper highlights the need to go beyond fairness-driven algorithms to systematically address ethical decisions spanning the stages of modeling, data curation, results analysis, and implementation of optimization-based decision support tools. Accordingly, this paper identifies ethical considerations required when deploying algorithms at the intersection of AI and optimization via case studies in power systems as well as supply chain and logistics. Rather than providing a prescriptive set of rules, this paper aims to foster reflection and awareness among researchers and encourage consideration of ethical implications at every step of the decision-making process.

Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (TAI) integrates ethics that align with human values, looking at their influence on AI behaviour and decision-making. Primarily dependent on self-assessment, TAI evaluation aims to ensure ethical standards and safety in AI development and usage. This paper reviews the current TAI evaluation methods in the literature and offers a classification, contributing to understanding self-assessment methods in this field., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, accepted for presentation at AIEB 2024: Workshop on Implementing AI Ethics Through a Behavioural Lens - ECAI, Octoebr 2024

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have become a powerful tool for modeling complex relationships in large-scale datasets. However, their black-box nature poses ethical challenges. In certain situations, ensuring ethical predictions might require following specific partial monotonic constraints. However, certifying if an already-trained ANN is partially monotonic is challenging. Therefore, ANNs are often disregarded in some critical applications, such as credit scoring, where partial monotonicity is required. To address this challenge, this paper presents a novel algorithm (LipVor) that certifies if a black-box model, such as an ANN, is positive based on a finite number of evaluations. Therefore, as partial monotonicity can be stated as a positivity condition of the partial derivatives, the LipVor Algorithm can certify whether an already trained ANN is partially monotonic. To do so, for every positively evaluated point, the Lipschitzianity of the black-box model is used to construct a specific neighborhood where the function remains positive. Next, based on the Voronoi diagram of the evaluated points, a sufficient condition is stated to certify if the function is positive in the domain. Compared to prior methods, our approach is able to mathematically certify if an ANN is partially monotonic without needing constrained ANN's architectures or piece-wise linear activation functions. Therefore, LipVor could open up the possibility of using unconstrained ANN in some critical fields. Moreover, some other properties of an ANN, such as convexity, can be posed as positivity conditions, and therefore, LipVor could also be applied., Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools into education has been a game-changer for teaching and assessment practices, bringing new opportunities, but also novel challenges which need to be dealt with. This paper presents the Comprehensive AI Assessment Framework (CAIAF), an evolved version of the AI Assessment Scale (AIAS) by Perkins, Furze, Roe, and MacVaugh, targeted toward the ethical integration of AI into educational assessments. This is where the CAIAF differs, as it incorporates stringent ethical guidelines, with clear distinctions based on educational levels, and advanced AI capabilities of real-time interactions and personalized assistance. The framework developed herein has a very intuitive use, mainly through the use of a color gradient that enhances the user-friendliness of the framework. Methodologically, the framework has been developed through the huge support of a thorough literature review and practical insight into the topic, becoming a dynamic tool to be used in different educational settings. The framework will ensure better learning outcomes, uphold academic integrity, and promote responsible use of AI, hence the need for this framework in modern educational practice., Comment: 13 Pages, 2 figures, 1 Framework

As artificial intelligence continues its unprecedented global expansion, accompanied by a proliferation of benefits, an increasing apprehension about the privacy and security implications of AI-enabled systems emerges. The pivotal question of effectively controlling AI development at both jurisdictional and organizational levels has become a prominent theme in contemporary discourse. While the European Parliament and Council have taken a decisive step by reaching a political agreement on the EU AI Act, the first comprehensive AI law, organizations still find it challenging to adapt to the fast-evolving AI landscape, lacking a universal tool for evaluating the privacy and security dimensions of their AI models and systems. In response to this critical challenge, this study conducts a systematic literature review spanning the years 2020 to 2023, with a primary focus on establishing a unified definition of key concepts in AI Ethics, particularly emphasizing the domains of privacy and security. Through the synthesis of knowledge extracted from the SLR, this study presents a conceptual framework tailored for privacy- and security-aware AI systems. This framework is designed to assist diverse stakeholders, including organizations, academic institutions, and governmental bodies, in both the development and critical assessment of AI systems. Essentially, the proposed framework serves as a guide for ethical decision-making, fostering an environment wherein AI is developed and utilized with a strong commitment to ethical principles. In addition, the study unravels the key issues and challenges surrounding the privacy and security dimensions, delineating promising avenues for future research, thereby contributing to the ongoing dialogue on the globalization and democratization of AI ethics., Comment: \c{opyright} Korobenko, D., Nikiforova, A., Rajesh, S. | ACM 2024. This paper has been accepted for publication in In Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record will be published in ACM DL

The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific research, particularly large language models (LLMs), has outpaced the development of ethical guidelines, leading to a Triple-Too problem: too many high-level ethical initiatives, too abstract principles lacking contextual and practical relevance, and too much focus on restrictions and risks over benefits and utilities. Existing approaches, including principlism (reliance on abstract ethical principles), formalism (rigid application of rules), and technical solutionism (overemphasis on technological fixes), offer little practical guidance for addressing ethical challenges of AI in scientific research practices. To bridge the gap between abstract principles and day-to-day research practices, a user-centered, realism-inspired approach is proposed here. It outlines five specific goals for ethical AI use: 1) understanding model training and output, including bias mitigation strategies; 2) respecting privacy, confidentiality, and copyright; 3) avoiding plagiarism and policy violations; 4) applying AI beneficially compared to alternatives; and 5) using AI transparently and reproducibly. Each goal is accompanied by actionable strategies and realistic cases of misuse and corrective measures. I argue that ethical AI application requires evaluating its utility against existing alternatives rather than isolated performance metrics. Additionally, I propose documentation guidelines to enhance transparency and reproducibility in AI-assisted research. Moving forward, we need targeted professional development, training programs, and balanced enforcement mechanisms to promote responsible AI use while fostering innovation. By refining these ethical guidelines and adapting them to emerging AI capabilities, we can accelerate scientific progress without compromising research integrity., Comment: Accepted in: AI and Ethics. 20 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables, 2 boxes

The main goal of this project is to create a new software artefact: a custom Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) for developers to discuss and solve ethical issues through AI engineering. This conversational agent will provide developers with practical application on (1) how to comply with legal frameworks which regard AI systems (like the EU AI Act~\cite{aiact} and GDPR~\cite{gdpr}) and (2) present alternate ethical perspectives to allow developers to understand and incorporate alternate moral positions. In this paper, we provide motivation for the need of such an agent, detail our idea and demonstrate a use case. The use of such a tool can allow practitioners to engineer AI solutions which meet legal requirements and satisfy diverse ethical perspectives.

This paper presents Social data and knowledge collective intelligence platform for TRaining Ethical AI Models (STREAM) to address the challenge of aligning AI models with human moral values, and to provide ethics datasets and knowledge bases to help promote AI models "follow good advice as naturally as a stream follows its course". By creating a comprehensive and representative platform that accurately mirrors the moral judgments of diverse groups including humans and AIs, we hope to effectively portray cultural and group variations, and capture the dynamic evolution of moral judgments over time, which in turn will facilitate the Establishment, Evaluation, Embedding, Embodiment, Ensemble, and Evolvement (6Es) of the moral capabilities of AI models. Currently, STREAM has already furnished a comprehensive collection of ethical scenarios, and amassed substantial moral judgment data annotated by volunteers and various popular Large Language Models (LLMs), collectively portraying the moral preferences and performances of both humans and AIs across a range of moral contexts. This paper will outline the current structure and construction of STREAM, explore its potential applications, and discuss its future prospects.

Whether and how data scientists, statisticians and modellers should be accountable for the AI systems they develop remains a controversial and highly debated topic, especially given the complexity of AI systems and the difficulties in comparing and synthesising competing claims arising from their deployment for data analysis. This paper proposes to address this issue by decreasing the opacity and heightening the accountability of decision making using AI systems, through the explicit acknowledgement of the statistical foundations that underpin their development and the ways in which these dictate how their results should be interpreted and acted upon by users. In turn, this enhances (1) the responsiveness of the models to feedback, (2) the quality and meaning of uncertainty on their outputs and (3) their transparency to evaluation. To exemplify this approach, we extend Posterior Belief Assessment to offer a route to belief ownership from complex and competing AI structures. We argue that this is a significant way to bring ethical considerations into mathematical reasoning, and to implement ethical AI in statistical practice. We demonstrate these ideas within the context of competing models used to advise the UK government on the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 during December 2021., Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures

In the diverse array of work investigating the nature of human values from psychology, philosophy and social sciences, there is a clear consensus that values guide behaviour. More recently, a recognition that values provide a means to engineer ethical AI has emerged. Indeed, Stuart Russell proposed shifting AI's focus away from simply ``intelligence'' towards intelligence ``provably aligned with human values''. This challenge -- the value alignment problem -- with others including an AI's learning of human values, aggregating individual values to groups, and designing computational mechanisms to reason over values, has energised a sustained research effort. Despite this, no formal, computational definition of values has yet been proposed. We address this through a formal conceptual framework rooted in the social sciences, that provides a foundation for the systematic, integrated and interdisciplinary investigation into how human values can support designing ethical AI.

In the last years, the raise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its pervasiveness in our lives, has sparked a flourishing debate about the ethical principles that should lead its implementation and use in society. Driven by these concerns, we conduct a rapid review of several frameworks providing principles, guidelines, and/or tools to help practitioners in the development and deployment of Responsible AI (RAI) applications. We map each framework w.r.t. the different Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) phases discovering that most of these frameworks fall just in the Requirements Elicitation phase, leaving the other phases uncovered. Very few of these frameworks offer supporting tools for practitioners, and they are mainly provided by private companies. Our results reveal that there is not a "catching-all" framework supporting both technical and non-technical stakeholders in the implementation of real-world projects. Our findings highlight the lack of a comprehensive framework encompassing all RAI principles and all (SDLC) phases that could be navigated by users with different skill sets and with different goals.

While the increased use of AI in the manufacturing sector has been widely noted, there is little understanding on the risks that it may raise in a manufacturing organisation. Although various high level frameworks and definitions have been proposed to consolidate potential risks, practitioners struggle with understanding and implementing them. This lack of understanding exposes manufacturing to a multitude of risks, including the organisation, its workers, as well as suppliers and clients. In this paper, we explore and interpret the applicability of responsible, ethical, and trustworthy AI within the context of manufacturing. We then use a broadened adaptation of a machine learning lifecycle to discuss, through the use of illustrative examples, how each step may result in a given AI trustworthiness concern. We additionally propose a number of research questions to the manufacturing research community, in order to help guide future research so that the economic and societal benefits envisaged by AI in manufacturing are delivered safely and responsibly., Comment: Pre-print under peer-review

The CoCoMo model proposes a computational solution to the challenge of incorporating ethical and emotional intelligence considerations into AI systems, with the aim of creating AI agents that combine knowledge with compassion. To achieve this goal, CoCoMo prioritizes fairness, beneficence, non-maleficence, empathy, adaptability, transparency, and critical and exploratory thinking abilities. The model employs consciousness modeling, reinforcement learning, and prompt template formulation to support these desired traits. By incorporating ethical and emotional intelligence considerations, a generative AI model can potentially lead to improved fairness, reduced toxicity, and increased reliability., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables

Building and implementing ethical AI systems that benefit the whole society is cost-intensive and a multi-faceted task fraught with potential problems. While computer science focuses mostly on the technical questions to mitigate social issues, social science addresses citizens' perceptions to elucidate social and political demands that influence the societal implementation of AI systems. Thus, in this study, we explore the salience of AI issues in the public with an emphasis on ethical criteria to investigate whether it is likely that ethical AI is actively requested by the population. Between May 2020 and April 2021, we conducted 15 surveys asking the German population about the most important AI-related issues (total of N=14,988 respondents). Our results show that the majority of respondents were not concerned with AI at all. However, it can be seen that general interest in AI and a higher educational level are predictive of some engagement with AI. Among those, who reported having thought about AI, specific applications (e.g., autonomous driving) were by far the most mentioned topics. Ethical issues are voiced only by a small subset of citizens with fairness, accountability, and transparency being the least mentioned ones. These have been identified in several ethical guidelines (including the EU Commission's proposal) as key elements for the development of ethical AI. The salience of ethical issues affects the behavioral intentions of citizens in the way that they 1) tend to avoid AI technology and 2) engage in public discussions about AI. We conclude that the low level of ethical implications may pose a serious problem for the actual implementation of ethical AI for the Common Good and emphasize that those who are presumably most affected by ethical issues of AI are especially unaware of ethical risks. Yet, once ethical AI is top of the mind, there is some potential for activism.

What does it mean to be responsible and responsive when developing and deploying trusted autonomous systems in Defence? In this short reflective article, we describe a case study of building a trusted autonomous system - Athena AI - within an industry-led, government-funded project with diverse collaborators and stakeholders. Using this case study, we draw out lessons on the value and impact of embedding responsible research and innovation-aligned, ethics-by-design approaches and principles throughout the development of technology at high translation readiness levels., Comment: 10 pages, 2 tables, pre-print approved for publication in the Special Issue Reflections on Responsible Research and Innovation for Trustworthy Autonomous Systems in the Journal of Responsible Technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to find more numerous and more critical applications in the financial services industry, giving rise to fair and ethical AI as an industry-wide objective. While many ethical principles and guidelines have been published in recent years, they fall short of addressing the serious challenges that model developers face when building ethical AI solutions. We survey the practical and overarching issues surrounding model development, from design and implementation complexities, to the shortage of tools, and the lack of organizational constructs. We show how practical considerations reveal the gaps between high-level principles and concrete, deployed AI applications, with the aim of starting industry-wide conversations toward solution approaches., Comment: 10 pages; expanded from conference version

The widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) in many domains has revealed numerous ethical issues from data and design to deployment. In response, countless broad principles and guidelines for ethical AI have been published, and following those, specific approaches have been proposed for how to encourage ethical outcomes of AI. Meanwhile, library and information services too are seeing an increase in the use of AI-powered and machine learning-powered information systems, but no practical guidance currently exists for libraries to plan for, evaluate, or audit the ethics of intended or deployed AI. We therefore report on several promising approaches for promoting ethical AI that can be adapted from other contexts to AI-powered information services and in different stages of the software lifecycle., Comment: Final version to appear in ASIS&T `21: Proceedings of the 84th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 58

We review practical challenges in building and deploying ethical AI at the scale of contemporary industrial and societal uses. Apart from the purely technical concerns that are the usual focus of academic research, the operational challenges of inconsistent regulatory pressures, conflicting business goals, data quality issues, development processes, systems integration practices, and the scale of deployment all conspire to create new ethical risks. Such ethical concerns arising from these practical considerations are not adequately addressed by existing research results. We argue that a holistic consideration of ethics in the development and deployment of AI systems is necessary for building ethical AI in practice, and exhort researchers to consider the full operational contexts of AI systems when assessing ethical risks., Comment: 6 pages; presented at ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Machine Learning in Finance (KDD-MLF) 2021

Test automation is common in software development; often one tests repeatedly to identify regressions. If the amount of test cases is large, one may select a subset and only use the most important test cases. The regression test selection (RTS) could be automated and enhanced with Artificial Intelligence (AI-RTS). This however could introduce ethical challenges. While such challenges in AI are in general well studied, there is a gap with respect to ethical AI-RTS. By exploring the literature and learning from our experiences of developing an industry AI-RTS tool, we contribute to the literature by identifying three challenges (assigning responsibility, bias in decision-making and lack of participation) and three approaches (explicability, supervision and diversity). Additionally, we provide a checklist for ethical AI-RTS to help guide the decision-making of the stakeholders involved in the process., Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure, accepted to AITest'21

The AI landscape demands a broad set of legal, ethical, and societal considerations to be accounted for in order to develop ethical AI (eAI) solutions which sustain human values and rights. Currently, a variety of guidelines and a handful of niche tools exist to account for and tackle individual challenges. However, it is also well established that many organizations face practical challenges in navigating these considerations from a risk management perspective. Therefore, new methodologies are needed to provide a well-vetted and real-world applicable structure and path through the checks and balances needed for ethically assessing and guiding the development of AI. In this paper we show that a multidisciplinary research approach, spanning cross-sectional viewpoints, is the foundation of a pragmatic definition of ethical and societal risks faced by organizations using AI. Equally important is the findings of cross-structural governance for implementing eAI successfully. Based on evidence acquired from our multidisciplinary research investigation, we propose a novel data-driven risk assessment methodology, entitled DRESS-eAI. In addition, through the evaluation of our methodological implementation, we demonstrate its state-of-the-art relevance as a tool for sustaining human values in the data-driven AI era., Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures

Ethics is sometimes considered to be too abstract to be meaningfully implemented in artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, we reflect on other aspects of computing that were previously considered to be very abstract. Yet, these are now accepted as being done very well by computers. These tasks have ranged from multiple aspects of software engineering to mathematics to conversation in natural language with humans. This was done by automating the simplest possible step and then building on it to perform more complex tasks. We wonder if ethical AI might be similarly achieved and advocate the process of automation as key step in making AI take ethical decisions. The key contribution of this paper is to reflect on how automation was introduced into domains previously considered too abstract for computers., Comment: 4 pages, 15th Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, 20-23 July 2021

The concept of AI for Social Good(AI4SG) is gaining momentum in both information societies and the AI community. Through all the advancement of AI-based solutions, it can solve societal issues effectively. To date, however, there is only a rudimentary grasp of what constitutes AI socially beneficial in principle, what constitutes AI4SG in reality, and what are the policies and regulations needed to ensure it. This paper fills the vacuum by addressing the ethical aspects that are critical for future AI4SG efforts. Some of these characteristics are new to AI, while others have greater importance due to its usage.

We are moving towards a future where Artificial Intelligence (AI) based agents make many decisions on behalf of humans. From healthcare decision making to social media censoring, these agents face problems, and make decisions with ethical and societal implications. Ethical behaviour is a critical characteristic that we would like in a human-centric AI. A common observation in human-centric industries, like the service industry and healthcare, is that their professionals tend to break rules, if necessary, for pro-social reasons. This behaviour among humans is defined as pro-social rule breaking. To make AI agents more human centric, we argue that there is a need for a mechanism that helps AI agents identify when to break rules set by their designers. To understand when AI agents need to break rules, we examine the conditions under which humans break rules for pro-social reasons. In this paper, we present a study that introduces a 'vaccination strategy dilemma' to human participants and analyses their responses. In this dilemma, one needs to decide whether they would distribute Covid-19 vaccines only to members of a high-risk group (follow the enforced rule) or, in selected cases, administer the vaccine to a few social influencers (break the rule), which might yield an overall greater benefit to society. The results of the empirical study suggest a relationship between stakeholder utilities and pro-social rule breaking (PSRB), which neither deontological nor utilitarian ethics completely explain. Finally, the paper discusses the design characteristics of an ethical agent capable of PSRB and the future research directions on PSRB in the AI realm. We hope that this will inform the design of future AI agents, and their decision-making behaviour., Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, Accepted version for AI & SOCIETY - Special Issue on AI for People

This paper aims to provide an overview of the ethical concerns in artificial intelligence (AI) and the framework that is needed to mitigate those risks, and to suggest a practical path to ensure the development and use of AI at the United Nations (UN) aligns with our ethical values. The overview discusses how AI is an increasingly powerful tool with potential for good, albeit one with a high risk of negative side-effects that go against fundamental human rights and UN values. It explains the need for ethical principles for AI aligned with principles for data governance, as data and AI are tightly interwoven. It explores different ethical frameworks that exist and tools such as assessment lists. It recommends that the UN develop a framework consisting of ethical principles, architectural standards, assessment methods, tools and methodologies, and a policy to govern the implementation and adherence to this framework, accompanied by an education program for staff.

We examine the problem of explainable AI (xAI) and explore what delivering xAI means in practice, particularly in contexts that involve formal or informal and ad-hoc collaboration where agency and accountability in decision-making are achieved and sustained interactionally. We use an example from an earlier study of collaborative decision-making in screening mammography and the difficulties users faced when trying to interpret the behavior of an AI tool to illustrate the challenges of delivering usable and effective xAI. We conclude by setting out a study programme for future research to help advance our understanding of xAI requirements for safe and ethical AI., Comment: 7 pages

While we have witnessed a rapid growth of ethics documents meant to guide AI development, the promotion of AI ethics has nonetheless proceeded with little input from AI practitioners themselves. Given the proliferation of AI for Social Good initiatives, this is an emerging gap that needs to be addressed in order to develop more meaningful ethical approaches to AI use and development. This paper offers a methodology, a shared fairness approach, aimed at identifying the needs of AI practitioners when it comes to confronting and resolving ethical challenges and to find a third space where their operational language can be married with that of the more abstract principles that presently remain at the periphery of their work experiences. We offer a grassroots approach to operational ethics based on dialog and mutualised responsibility. This methodology is centred around conversations intended to elicit practitioners perceived ethical attribution and distribution over key value laden operational decisions, to identify when these decisions arise and what ethical challenges they confront, and to engage in a language of ethics and responsibility which enables practitioners to internalise ethical responsibility. The methodology bridges responsibility imbalances that rest in structural decision making power and elite technical knowledge, by commencing with personal, facilitated conversations, returning the ethical discourse to those meant to give it meaning at the sharp end of the ecosystem. Our primary contribution is to add to the recent literature seeking to bring AI practitioners' experiences to the fore by offering a methodology for understanding how ethics manifests as a relational and interdependent sociotechnical practice in their work., Comment: Submitted to the 2020 IEEE / ITU International Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Good

Over the next few years, society as a whole will need to address what core values it wishes to protect when dealing with technology. Anthropology, a field dedicated to the very notion of what it means to be human, can provide some interesting insights into how to cope and tackle these changes in our Western society and other areas of the world. It can be challenging for social science practitioners to grasp and keep up with the pace of technological innovation, with many being unfamiliar with the jargon of AI. This short guide serves as both an introduction to AI ethics and social science and anthropological perspectives on the development of AI. It intends to provide those unfamiliar with the field with an insight into the societal impact of AI systems and how, in turn, these systems can lead us to rethink how our world operates., Comment: 46 pages

Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a direct impact on the daily life of billions of people. Being applied to sectors like finance, health, security and advertisement, AI fuels some of the biggest companies and research institutions in the world. Its impact in the near future seems difficult to predict or bound. In contrast to all this power, society remains mostly ignorant of the capabilities and standard practices of AI today. To address this imbalance, improving current interactions between people and AI systems, we propose a transparency scheme to be implemented on any AI system open to the public. The scheme is based on two pillars: Data Privacy and AI Transparency. The first recognizes the relevance of data for AI, and is supported by GDPR. The second considers aspects of AI transparency currently unregulated: AI capabilities, purpose and source. We design this pillar based on ethical principles. For each of the two pillars, we define a three-level display. The first level is based on visual signs, inspired by traffic signs managing the interaction between people and cars, and designed for quick and universal interpretability. The second level uses factsheets, providing limited details. The last level provides access to all available information. After detailing and exemplifying the proposed transparency scheme, we define a set of principles for creating transparent by design software, to be used during the integration of AI components on user-oriented services., Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables

AI Ethics is now a global topic of discussion in academic and policy circles. At least 84 public-private initiatives have produced statements describing high-level principles, values, and other tenets to guide the ethical development, deployment, and governance of AI. According to recent meta-analyses, AI Ethics has seemingly converged on a set of principles that closely resemble the four classic principles of medical ethics. Despite the initial credibility granted to a principled approach to AI Ethics by the connection to principles in medical ethics, there are reasons to be concerned about its future impact on AI development and governance. Significant differences exist between medicine and AI development that suggest a principled approach in the latter may not enjoy success comparable to the former. Compared to medicine, AI development lacks (1) common aims and fiduciary duties, (2) professional history and norms, (3) proven methods to translate principles into practice, and (4) robust legal and professional accountability mechanisms. These differences suggest we should not yet celebrate consensus around high-level principles that hide deep political and normative disagreement., Comment: A previous, pre-print version of this paper was entitled 'AI Ethics - Too Principled to Fail?'

Knowing the reflection of game theory and ethics, we develop a mathematical representation to bridge the gap between the concepts in moral philosophy (e.g., Kantian and Utilitarian) and AI ethics industry technology standard (e.g., IEEE P7000 standard series for Ethical AI). As an application, we demonstrate how human value can be obtained from the experimental game theory (e.g., trust game experiment) so as to build an ethical AI. Moreover, an approach to test the ethics (rightness or wrongness) of a given AI algorithm by using an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game experiment is discussed as an example. Compared with existing mathematical frameworks and testing method on AI ethics technology, the advantages of the proposed approach are analyzed., Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures

AI-based systems, including Large Language Models (LLMs), impact millions by supporting diverse tasks but face issues like misinformation, bias, and misuse. Ethical AI development is crucial as new technologies and concerns emerge, but objective, practical ethical guidance remains debated. This study examines LLMs in developing ethical AI systems, assessing how trustworthiness-enhancing techniques affect ethical AI output generation. Using the Design Science Research (DSR) method, we identify techniques for LLM trustworthiness: multi-agents, distinct roles, structured communication, and multiple rounds of debate. We design the multi-agent prototype LLM-BMAS, where agents engage in structured discussions on real-world ethical AI issues from the AI Incident Database. The prototype's performance is evaluated through thematic analysis, hierarchical clustering, ablation studies, and source code execution. Our system generates around 2,000 lines per run, compared to only 80 lines in the ablation study. Discussions reveal terms like bias detection, transparency, accountability, user consent, GDPR compliance, fairness evaluation, and EU AI Act compliance, showing LLM-BMAS's ability to generate thorough source code and documentation addressing often-overlooked ethical AI issues. However, practical challenges in source code integration and dependency management may limit smooth system adoption by practitioners. This study aims to shed light on enhancing trustworthiness in LLMs to support practitioners in developing ethical AI-based systems.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) aims to elevate healthcare to a pinnacle by aiding clinical decision support. Overcoming the challenges related to the design of ethical AI will enable clinicians, physicians, healthcare professionals, and other stakeholders to use and trust AI in healthcare settings. This study attempts to identify the major ethical principles influencing the utility performance of AI at different technological levels such as data access, algorithms, and systems through a thematic analysis. We observed that justice, privacy, bias, lack of regulations, risks, and interpretability are the most important principles to consider for ethical AI. This data-driven study has analyzed secondary survey data from the Pew Research Center (2020) of 36 AI experts to categorize the top ethical principles of AI design. To resolve the ethical issues identified by the meta-analysis and domain experts, we propose a new utilitarian ethics-based theoretical framework for designing ethical AI for the healthcare domain.

Complying with the EU AI Act (AIA) guidelines while developing and implementing AI systems will soon be mandatory within the EU. However, practitioners lack actionable instructions to operationalise ethics during AI systems development. A literature review of different ethical guidelines revealed inconsistencies in the principles addressed and the terminology used to describe them. Furthermore, requirements engineering (RE), which is identified to foster trustworthiness in the AI development process from the early stages was observed to be absent in a lot of frameworks that support the development of ethical and trustworthy AI. This incongruous phrasing combined with a lack of concrete development practices makes trustworthy AI development harder. To address this concern, we formulated a comparison table for the terminology used and the coverage of the ethical AI principles in major ethical AI guidelines. We then examined the applicability of ethical AI development frameworks for performing effective RE during the development of trustworthy AI systems. A tertiary review and meta-analysis of literature discussing ethical AI frameworks revealed their limitations when developing trustworthy AI. Based on our findings, we propose recommendations to address such limitations during the development of trustworthy AI., Comment: Accepted at [TAS '23]{First International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems}

AI ethics is an emerging field with multiple, competing narratives about how to best solve the problem of building human values into machines. Two major approaches are focused on bias and compliance, respectively. But neither of these ideas fully encompasses ethics: using moral principles to decide how to act in a particular situation. Our method posits that the way data is labeled plays an essential role in the way AI behaves, and therefore in the ethics of machines themselves. The argument combines a fundamental insight from ethics (i.e. that ethics is about values) with our practical experience building and scaling machine learning systems. We want to build AI that is actually ethical by first addressing foundational concerns: how to build good systems, how to define what is good in relation to system architecture, and who should provide that definition. Building ethical AI creates a foundation of trust between a company and the users of that platform. But this trust is unjustified unless users experience the direct value of ethical AI. Until users have real control over how algorithms behave, something is missing in current AI solutions. This causes massive distrust in AI, and apathy towards AI ethics solutions. The scope of this paper is to propose an alternative path that allows for the plurality of values and the freedom of individual expression. Both are essential for realizing true moral character., Comment: 29 pages total, 1 table, 9 figures

Within the current AI ethics discourse, there is a gap in empirical research on understanding how AI practitioners understand ethics and socially organize to operationalize ethical concerns, particularly in the context of AI start-ups. This gap intensifies the risk of a disconnect between scholarly research, innovation, and application. This risk materializes acutely as mounting pressures to identify and mitigate the potential harms of AI systems have created an urgent need to assess and implement socio-technical innovation for fairness, accountability, and transparency. Building on social practice theory, we address this need via a framework that allows AI researchers, practitioners, and regulators to systematically analyze existing cultural understandings, histories, and social practices of ethical AI to define appropriate strategies for effectively implementing socio-technical innovations. Our contributions are threefold: 1) we introduce a practice-based approach for understanding ethical AI; 2) we present empirical findings from our study on the operationalization of ethics in German AI start-ups to underline that AI ethics and social practices must be understood in their specific cultural and historical contexts; and 3) based on our empirical findings, we suggest that ethical AI practices can be broken down into principles, needs, narratives, materializations, and cultural genealogies to form a useful backdrop for considering socio-technical innovations.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming our daily life with several applications in healthcare, space exploration, banking and finance. These rapid progresses in AI have brought increasing attention to the potential impacts of AI technologies on society, with ethically questionable consequences. In recent years, several ethical principles have been released by governments, national and international organisations. These principles outline high-level precepts to guide the ethical development, deployment, and governance of AI. However, the abstract nature, diversity, and context-dependency of these principles make them difficult to implement and operationalize, resulting in gaps between principles and their execution. Most recent work analysed and summarized existing AI principles and guidelines but they did not provide findings on principle-implementation gaps and how to mitigate them. These findings are particularly important to ensure that AI implementations are aligned with ethical principles and values. In this paper, we provide a contextual and global evaluation of current ethical AI principles for all continents, with the aim to identify potential principle characteristics tailored to specific countries or applicable across countries. Next, we analyze the current level of AI readiness and current implementations of ethical AI principles in different countries, to identify gaps in the implementation of AI principles and their causes. Finally, we propose recommendations to mitigate the principle-implementation gaps.

Numerous AI ethics checklists and frameworks have been proposed focusing on different dimensions of ethical AI such as fairness, explainability, and safety. Yet, no such work has been done on developing transparent AI systems for real-world educational scenarios. This paper presents a Transparency Index framework that has been iteratively co-designed with different stakeholders of AI in education, including educators, ed-tech experts, and AI practitioners. We map the requirements of transparency for different categories of stakeholders of AI in education and demonstrate that transparency considerations are embedded in the entire AI development process from the data collection stage until the AI system is deployed in the real world and iteratively improved. We also demonstrate how transparency enables the implementation of other ethical AI dimensions in Education like interpretability, accountability, and safety. In conclusion, we discuss the directions for future research in this newly emerging field. The main contribution of this study is that it highlights the importance of transparency in developing AI-powered educational technologies and proposes an index framework for its conceptualization for AI in education., Comment: 17 pages, 4 Figures, 2 Tables

Incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives is seen as an essential step towards enhancing artificial intelligence (AI) ethics. In this regard, the field of arts is perceived to play a key role in elucidating diverse historical and cultural narratives, serving as a bridge across research communities. Most of the works that examine the interplay between the field of arts and AI ethics concern digital artworks, largely exploring the potential of computational tools in being able to surface biases in AI systems. In this paper, we investigate a complementary direction--that of uncovering the unique socio-cultural perspectives embedded in human-made art, which in turn, can be valuable in expanding the horizon of AI ethics. Through semi-structured interviews across sixteen artists, art scholars, and researchers of diverse Indian art forms like music, sculpture, painting, floor drawings, dance, etc., we explore how {\it non-Western} ethical abstractions, methods of learning, and participatory practices observed in Indian arts, one of the most ancient yet perpetual and influential art traditions, can shed light on aspects related to ethical AI systems. Through a case study concerning the Indian dance system (i.e. the {\it `Natyashastra'}), we analyze potential pathways towards enhancing ethics in AI systems. Insights from our study outline the need for (1) incorporating empathy in ethical AI algorithms, (2) integrating multimodal data formats for ethical AI system design and development, (3) viewing AI ethics as a dynamic, diverse, cumulative, and shared process rather than as a static, self-contained framework to facilitate adaptability without annihilation of values (4) consistent life-long learning to enhance AI accountability

Training multimodal generative models on large, uncurated datasets can result in users being exposed to harmful, unsafe and controversial or culturally-inappropriate outputs. While model editing has been proposed to remove or filter undesirable concepts in embedding and latent spaces, it can inadvertently damage learned manifolds, distorting concepts in close semantic proximity. We identify limitations in current model editing techniques, showing that even benign, proximal concepts may become misaligned. To address the need for safe content generation, we propose a modular, dynamic solution that leverages safety-context embeddings and a dual reconstruction process using tunable weighted summation in the latent space to generate safer images. Our method preserves global context without compromising the structural integrity of the learned manifolds. We achieve state-of-the-art results on safe image generation benchmarks, while offering controllable variation of model safety. We identify trade-offs between safety and censorship, which presents a necessary perspective in the development of ethical AI models. We will release our code. Keywords: Text-to-Image Models, Generative AI, Safety, Reliability, Model Editing, Comment: This research is supported by the NISDRG project #20100007, funded by the Australian Government

Subjective NLP tasks usually rely on human annotations provided by multiple annotators, whose judgments may vary due to their diverse backgrounds and life experiences. Traditional methods often aggregate multiple annotations into a single ground truth, disregarding the diversity in perspectives that arises from annotator disagreement. In this preliminary study, we examine the effect of including multiple annotations on model accuracy in classification. Our methodology investigates the performance of perspective-aware classification models in stance detection task and further inspects if annotator disagreement affects the model confidence. The results show that multi-perspective approach yields better classification performance outperforming the baseline which uses the single label. This entails that designing more inclusive perspective-aware AI models is not only an essential first step in implementing responsible and ethical AI, but it can also achieve superior results than using the traditional approaches.

As AI closely interacts with human society, it is crucial to ensure that its decision-making is safe, altruistic, and aligned with human ethical and moral values. However, existing research on embedding ethical and moral considerations into AI remains insufficient, and previous external constraints based on principles and rules are inadequate to provide AI with long-term stability and generalization capabilities. In contrast, the intrinsic altruistic motivation based on empathy is more willing, spontaneous, and robust. Therefore, this paper is dedicated to autonomously driving intelligent agents to acquire morally behaviors through human-like affective empathy mechanisms. We draw inspiration from the neural mechanism of human brain's moral intuitive decision-making, and simulate the mirror neuron system to construct a brain-inspired affective empathy-driven altruistic decision-making model. Here, empathy directly impacts dopamine release to form intrinsic altruistic motivation. Based on the principle of moral utilitarianism, we design the moral reward function that integrates intrinsic empathy and extrinsic self-task goals. A comprehensive experimental scenario incorporating empathetic processes, personal objectives, and altruistic goals is developed. The proposed model enables the agent to make consistent moral decisions (prioritizing altruism) by balancing self-interest with the well-being of others. We further introduce inhibitory neurons to regulate different levels of empathy and verify the positive correlation between empathy levels and altruistic preferences, yielding conclusions consistent with findings from psychological behavioral experiments. This work provides a feasible solution for the development of ethical AI by leveraging the intrinsic human-like empathy mechanisms, and contributes to the harmonious coexistence between humans and AI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, particularly machine learning techniques, are rapidly transforming tactical operations by augmenting human decision-making capabilities. This paper explores AI-driven Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) as a transformative approach, focusing on how it empowers human decision-making in complex environments. While trust and explainability continue to pose significant challenges, our exploration focuses on the potential of AI-driven HAT to transform tactical operations. By improving situational awareness and supporting more informed decision-making, AI-driven HAT can enhance the effectiveness and safety of such operations. To this end, we propose a comprehensive framework that addresses the key components of AI-driven HAT, including trust and transparency, optimal function allocation between humans and AI, situational awareness, and ethical considerations. The proposed framework can serve as a foundation for future research and development in the field. By identifying and discussing critical research challenges and knowledge gaps in this framework, our work aims to guide the advancement of AI-driven HAT for optimizing tactical operations. We emphasize the importance of developing scalable and ethical AI-driven HAT systems that ensure seamless human-machine collaboration, prioritize ethical considerations, enhance model transparency through Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, and effectively manage the cognitive load of human operators., Comment: Submitted for review to the Proceedings of the IEEE

As AI systems increasingly integrate into critical societal sectors, the demand for robust privacy-preserving methods has escalated. This paper introduces Data Obfuscation through Latent Space Projection (LSP), a novel technique aimed at enhancing AI governance and ensuring Responsible AI compliance. LSP uses machine learning to project sensitive data into a latent space, effectively obfuscating it while preserving essential features for model training and inference. Unlike traditional privacy methods like differential privacy or homomorphic encryption, LSP transforms data into an abstract, lower-dimensional form, achieving a delicate balance between data utility and privacy. Leveraging autoencoders and adversarial training, LSP separates sensitive from non-sensitive information, allowing for precise control over privacy-utility trade-offs. We validate LSP's effectiveness through experiments on benchmark datasets and two real-world case studies: healthcare cancer diagnosis and financial fraud analysis. Our results show LSP achieves high performance (98.7% accuracy in image classification) while providing strong privacy (97.3% protection against sensitive attribute inference), outperforming traditional anonymization and privacy-preserving methods. The paper also examines LSP's alignment with global AI governance frameworks, such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, highlighting its contribution to fairness, transparency, and accountability. By embedding privacy within the machine learning pipeline, LSP offers a promising approach to developing AI systems that respect privacy while delivering valuable insights. We conclude by discussing future research directions, including theoretical privacy guarantees, integration with federated learning, and enhancing latent space interpretability, positioning LSP as a critical tool for ethical AI advancement., Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Conference ICADCML2025

Responsibility is a key notion in multi-agent systems and in creating safe, reliable and ethical AI. However, most previous work on responsibility has only considered responsibility for single outcomes. In this paper we present a model for responsibility attribution in a multi-agent, multi-value setting. We also expand our model to cover responsibility anticipation, demonstrating how considerations of responsibility can help an agent to select strategies that are in line with its values. In particular we show that non-dominated regret-minimising strategies reliably minimise an agent's expected degree of responsibility.

Understanding the creation, evolution, and dissemination of scientific knowledge is crucial for bridging diverse subject areas and addressing complex global challenges such as pandemics, climate change, and ethical AI. Scientometrics, the quantitative and qualitative study of scientific literature, provides valuable insights into these processes. We introduce Scito2M, a longitudinal scientometric dataset with over two million academic publications, providing comprehensive contents information and citation graphs to support cross-disciplinary analyses. Using Scito2M, we conduct a temporal study spanning over 30 years to explore key questions in scientometrics: the evolution of academic terminology, citation patterns, and interdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Our findings reveal critical insights, such as disparities in epistemic cultures, knowledge production modes, and citation practices. For example, rapidly developing, application-driven fields like LLMs exhibit significantly shorter citation age (2.48 years) compared to traditional theoretical disciplines like oral history (9.71 years)., Comment: 19 pages