Beyond the hype: Key components of an effective AI policy; CIO, October 2, 2024

 Leo Rajapakse, CIO; Beyond the hype: Key components of an effective AI policy

"An AI policy is a living document 

Crafting an AI policy for your company is increasingly important due to the rapid growth and impact of AI technologies. By prioritizing ethical considerations, data governance, transparency and compliance, companies can harness the transformative potential of AI while mitigating risks and building trust with stakeholders. Remember, an effective AI policy is a living document that evolves with technological advancements and societal expectations. By investing in responsible AI practices today, businesses can pave the way for a sustainable and ethical future tomorrow."

How Companies Can Take a Global Approach to AI Ethics; Harvard Business Review (HBR), August 5, 2024

Swanand Deodhar, 

Favour Borokini, and 

Ben Waber, 

Harvard Business Review (HBR) ; How Companies Can Take a Global Approach to AI Ethics

"Getting the AI ethics policy right is a high-stakes affair for an organization. Well-published instances of gender biases in hiring algorithms or job search results may diminish the company’s reputation, pit the company against regulations, and even attract hefty government fines. Sensing such threats, organizations are increasingly creating dedicated structures and processes to inculcate AI ethics proactively. Some companies have moved further along this road, creating institutional frameworks for AI ethics.

Many efforts, however, miss an important fact: ethics differ from one cultural context to the next...

Western perspectives are also implicitly being encoded into AI models. For example, some estimates show that less than 3% of all images on ImageNet represent the Indian and Chinese diaspora, which collectively account for a third of the global population. Broadly, a lack of high-quality data will likely lead to low predictive power and bias against underrepresented groups — or even make it impossible for tools to be developed for certain communities at all. LLMs can’t currently be trained for languages that aren’t heavily represented on the Internet, for instance. A recent survey of IT organizations in India revealed that the lack of high-quality data remains the most dominant impediment to ethical AI practices.

As AI gains ground and dictates business operations, an unchecked lack of variety in ethical considerations may harm companies and their customers.

To address this problem, companies need to develop a contextual global AI ethics model that prioritizes collaboration with local teams and stakeholders and devolves decision-making authority to those local teams. This is particularly necessary if their operations span several geographies."

Corporate directors weigh AI ethics at first-of-its-kind forum; Harvard Gazette, July 11, 2024

Harvard Gazette; Corporate directors weigh AI ethics at first-of-its-kind forum

"As artificial intelligence surges, corporate directors face a set of urgent ethical considerations. What role can they play in fostering responsible practices for using AI in the workplace? Are they already using the bias-prone technology to sort through job applications?

At the inaugural Directors’ AI Ethics Forum, leaders from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors pondered these questions and more. Convening the group on the Harvard Business School campus was the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics’ Business AI Ethics research team, an initiative that promotes thoughtful approaches to the rapidly evolving technology."

AI Ethics Council Founded by Open AI and Operation HOPE Holds Inaugural Meeting; PR Newswire, July 1, 2024

Operation HOPE, Inc., PR Newswire ; AI Ethics Council Founded by Open AI and Operation HOPE Holds Inaugural Meeting

"The AI Ethics Council, founded by Open AI CEO Sam Altman and Operation HOPE CEO John Hope Bryant, held its inaugural meeting on Friday, June 28th in Atlanta. The group, which evolved out of a listening tour that was initiated last spring at Clark Atlanta University that Mr. Altman and Mr. Bryant conducted together, was formed to ensure that traditionally underrepresented communities would have a voice in the evolution of AI overall— to help frame the human and ethical considerations around the technology, and vast participation in the economic opportunities of artificial intelligence.  The council was announced in December 2023 at the HOPE Global Forums | Annual Meeting in Atlanta.

The AI Ethics Council is an interdisciplinary body of diverse experts designed to become a leading authority in identifying, advising on, and addressing ethical issues related to artificial intelligence and its impact on underserved and historically excluded communities."

Prevent An AI Disaster Like The One At McDonald’s By Serving Up Ethics; Forbes, July 1, 2024

 Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D., Forbes; Prevent An AI Disaster Like The One At McDonald’s By Serving Up Ethics

"Would you like some bacon with your ice cream? How about an order of 260 Chicken McNuggets? These are but a few of the menu mishaps that occurred after McDonald’s incorporated AI into its drive-through experience.

The comic results of this technological mishap are the stuff of late-night television shows, but the core issues are anything but funny. No company wants its promising initiatives to become fodder for comedians.

The best way for your company to prevent an AI-generated disasters like this one is to embed ethical considerations into every step of the process you use to take an idea to market.

Here are three guidelines for making sure your business doesn’t become a feature on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s “Meanwhile” segment."

How to best accommodate neurodiverse lawyers and neurodivergent clients; ABA Journal, May 19, 2022

Haley Moss, ABA Journal; How to best accommodate neurodiverse lawyers and neurodivergent clients

"Supporting and accommodating neurodivergent clients

Something that always is brought up to me when neurodivergent clients come up are ethical considerations—what to do with interpreters, diminished capacity concerns or competence. But a lot of those concerns are also our own biases showing with regard what we think neurodiversity is (or is not). Instead, as lawyers, it’s up to us to practice a little bit of empathy. People seek out lawyers for all sorts of reasons: Maybe they’re starting a business, or they were fired or getting divorced, or getting sued. There’s already a natural fear or surprise element to that initial interaction for clients, without our judgments based on a person’s cognitive abilities.

To lead with empathy, think about how to make those first interactions less terrifying in order to build trust. There’s a knowledge gap lawyers have about disability culture. Presume competence by treating us like any other client; it’s one of the easiest ways to show respect. It’s frustrating even to me when I get talked down to like a little kid because I’m autistic, and your adult neurodivergent clients probably have had similar experiences. To that effect, something we all can do better is clean up legal jargon and use plain language, explaining concepts in an easy-to-understand format.

I also like trying to meet folks where they are." 

Has COVID-19 changed the face of tech ethics forever?; IDG, April 23, 2020

Pat Martlew, IDG; Has COVID-19 changed the face of tech ethics forever?

"So, are the more heavy-handed approaches worth implementing if it leads to lives being saved? Prominent technologist and tech ethics expert Anne Currie says that while she wouldn't necessarily advocate for China's approach, there is a degree to which ethical considerations must be eased if we are to save a considerable number of lives.

"Tech ethics in the good times and tech ethics in the bad times are extremely different. When you've got hundreds of thousands of lives on the line, we all do occasionally need to suspend some of our privileges. That is just the reality of the situation," she says

"Right now, we are in a battle. We're in a battle with an implacable other. We're not battling with a competitor at work and we're not battling with another country, as difficult as that may be. We are battling with a virus that doesn't care at all about us. It doesn't care about fairness, diversity, privacy, or any of the good things that we generally value. It will just kill us if we don't act and that has changed where our priorities lie, which is the right thing to happen."

The Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress: Challenges for information practice and information policy; First Monday, 7/6/15

Michael Zimmer, First Monday; The Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress: Challenges for information practice and information policy:

"Abstract

In April 2010, the U.S. Library of Congress and the popular micro-blogging company Twitter announced that every public tweet, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library and made available to researchers. The Library of Congress’ planned digital archive of all public tweets holds great promise for the research community, yet, over five years since its announcement, the archive remains unavailable. This paper explores the challenges faced by the Library that have prevented the timely realization of this valuable archive, divided into two categories: challenges involving practice, such as how to organize the tweets, how to provide useful means of retrieval, how to physically store them; and challenges involving policy, such as the creation of access controls to the archive, whether any information should be censored or restricted, and the broader ethical considerations of the very existence of such an archive, especially privacy and user control."