Minimum Viable Ethics: From Institutionalizing Industry AI Governance to Product Impact

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ahlawat, Archana, Winecoff, Amy, Mayer, Jonathan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Ahlawat, Archana
Winecoff, Amy
Mayer, Jonathan
author_facet Ahlawat, Archana
Winecoff, Amy
Mayer, Jonathan
contents Across the technology industry, many companies have expressed their commitments to AI ethics and created dedicated roles responsible for translating high-level ethics principles into product. Yet it is unclear how effective this has been in leading to meaningful product changes. Through semi-structured interviews with 26 professionals working on AI ethics in industry, we uncover challenges and strategies of institutionalizing ethics work along with translation into product impact. We ultimately find that AI ethics professionals are highly agile and opportunistic, as they attempt to create standardized and reusable processes and tools in a corporate environment in which they have little traditional power. In negotiations with product teams, they face challenges rooted in their lack of authority and ownership over product, but can push forward ethics work by leveraging narratives of regulatory response and ethics as product quality assurance. However, this strategy leaves us with a minimum viable ethics, a narrowly scoped industry AI ethics that is limited in its capacity to address normative issues separate from compliance or product quality. Potential future regulation may help bridge this gap.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_06926
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Minimum Viable Ethics: From Institutionalizing Industry AI Governance to Product Impact
Ahlawat, Archana
Winecoff, Amy
Mayer, Jonathan
Human-Computer Interaction
Computers and Society
Across the technology industry, many companies have expressed their commitments to AI ethics and created dedicated roles responsible for translating high-level ethics principles into product. Yet it is unclear how effective this has been in leading to meaningful product changes. Through semi-structured interviews with 26 professionals working on AI ethics in industry, we uncover challenges and strategies of institutionalizing ethics work along with translation into product impact. We ultimately find that AI ethics professionals are highly agile and opportunistic, as they attempt to create standardized and reusable processes and tools in a corporate environment in which they have little traditional power. In negotiations with product teams, they face challenges rooted in their lack of authority and ownership over product, but can push forward ethics work by leveraging narratives of regulatory response and ethics as product quality assurance. However, this strategy leaves us with a minimum viable ethics, a narrowly scoped industry AI ethics that is limited in its capacity to address normative issues separate from compliance or product quality. Potential future regulation may help bridge this gap.
title Minimum Viable Ethics: From Institutionalizing Industry AI Governance to Product Impact
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06926