AI Needs a Strong Code of Ethics to Keep its Dark Side From Overtaking us

This article originally appeared in MarketWatch, October 18, 2023.

A framework for tech companies and regulators to create AI that is principled and accountable.

With the advent of generative artificial intelligence, AI-industry leaders have been candidly expressing their concerns about the power of the machine learning systems they are unleashing.

Some AI creators, having launched their new AI-powered products, are calling for regulation and legislation to curb its use. Suggestions include a six-month moratorium on the training of AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, a call that includes several alarming questions:

Should we let machines flood information channels with propaganda and untruth?

Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?

Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?

Should we risk the loss of control of our civilization?

In response to these concerns, these two paths, legislative regulation or moratoria on development, have received the most attention.

There is a third option: not creating potentially dangerous products in the first place.

But how? By adopting an ethical framework and implementing it, companies have a path for the development of AI and legislators have a guide to implement responsible regulation. This path offers an approach to help AI leaders and developers wrestling with the myriad decisions that appear with any new technology.

Standing for values

We have been listening to senior representatives of Silicon Valley companies for several years, and are impressed by their desire to maintain high ethical standards for themselves and their industry, made clear by the number of initiatives that seek to ensure that technology will be “responsible,” at “the service of humanity,” “human centered,” and “ethical by design.” This desire reflects personal commitments to doing good and understandable aversions to reputational damage and long-term commercial harm.

So we find ourselves at a rare moment of consensus between public opinion and the ethical values corporate leaders have said should guide technological development— values such as safety, fairness, inclusion, transparency, privacy and reliability. Yet despite these good intentions, bad things still seem to happen in the tech industry.

What we lack is an accompanying consensus on exactly how to develop products and services using these values and thus achieve the goals desired by both the public and industry leaders.

For the past four years, the Institute for Technology, Ethics, and Culture in Silicon Valley (ITEC) — an initiative of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University with support from the Vatican’s Center for Digital Culture at the Dicastery for Culture and Education — has been working to develop a system to connect good intentions to concrete and practical guidance in tech development.

The result of this project is a comprehensive roadmap guiding companies towards organizational accountability and the production of ethically responsible products and services. This strategy includes both a governance framework for responsible technology development and use, and a management system for deploying it.