How industry experts are navigating the ethics of artificial intelligence; CNN, September 11, 2023

CNN; How industry experts are navigating the ethics of artificial intelligence

"CNN heads to one of the longest-running artificial intelligence conferences in the world, to explore how industry experts and tech companies are trying to develop AI that is fairer and more transparent."

AI gatekeepers are taking baby steps toward raising ethical standards; Quartz, June 26, 2020

Nicolás Rivero, Quartz; AI gatekeepers are taking baby steps toward raising ethical standards

"This year, for the first time, major AI conferences—the gatekeepers for publishing research—are forcing computer scientists to think about those consequences.

The Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems will require a “broader impact statement” addressing the effect a piece of research might have on society. The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing will begin rejecting papers on ethical grounds. Others have emphasized their voluntary guidelines.

The new standards follow the publication of several ethically dubious papers. Microsoft collaborated with researchers at Beihang University to algorithmically generate fake comments on news stories. Harrisburg University researchers developed a tool to predict the likelihood someone will commit a crime based on their face. Researchers clashed on Twitter over the wisdom of publishing these and other papers.

“The research community is beginning to acknowledge that we have some level of responsibility for how these systems are used,” says Inioluwa Raji, a tech fellow at NYU’s AI Now Institute. Scientists have an obligation to think about applications and consider restricting research, she says, especially in fields like facial recognition with a high potential for misuse."