"In recent years, AI companies have been publicly chided for generating machine learning algorithms that discriminate against historically marginalized groups. To quell that criticism, many companies pledged to ensure their products are fair, transparent, and accountable, but these promises are frequently criticized as being mere “ethics washing,” says Sanna Ali, who recently received her PhD from the Stanford University Department of Communication in the School of Humanities and Sciences. “There’s a concern that these companies talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.”
To explore whether that’s the case, Ali interviewed AI ethics workers from some of the largest companies in the field. The research project, co-authored with Stanford Assistant Professor of Communication Angèle Christin, Google researcher Andrew Smart, and Stanford W.M Keck Professor and Professor of Management Science and Engineering Riitta Katila, was partially funded by a seed grant from Stanford HAI and published in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency(FAccT ’23). The study found that ethics initiatives and interventions were difficult to implement in the tech industry’s institutional environment. Specifically, Ali found, teams were largely under-resourced and under-supported by leadership, and they lacked authority to act on problems they identified."
