Ethical AI
By Adeola Egbeleye
As the world advances, so does technology. Drones, holograms, and transportation in space are just a few examples of how far technology has come. But a growing problem in our society that revolves around social media, internet safety, and privacy is the concern of artificial intelligence. However, this program has many faults such as bias, surveillance, and privacy. Though many fear the future of AI, it is not going away anytime soon.
In today’s society, AI can be found in popular social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. For example, on the infamous app TikTok, there is a regulation in which you can not delete your account until all your data is transferred after thirty days. This raises the concern about privacy. On apps such as TikTok, consent is freely given when the terms and conditions are not being read thoroughly and data can be used beyond their imagined purpose. Over 750 million people use TikTok, and a majority of users are from eleven to twenty-one years old. Unfortunately, data is collected on people who are not the target of data collection due to mass usage. Users are cautious about automated technologies that collect and use their data, which could include sensitive information about them. In cases when data has been anonymized, there is also a chance that it will either be deanonymized or it will not be properly anonymized in the first place.
Another major flaw of AI is surveillance. Surveillance in AI is used for the purpose of identifying people, cars, objects, qualities, and events, video security cameras' audio and images must be analyzed. However, there are cases when there are errors in surveillance that are sometimes man-made or accidental. Carmel Shachar, Sara Gerke, and Eli Y. Adashi write, “The use of AI for surveillance purposes (such as detecting new Covid‐19 cases and gathering data from healthy and ill individuals) in a pandemic raises multiple concerns ranging from privacy to discrimination to access to care.” While these errors that could be accidental seem to have very little meaning, these small mishaps could lead to miscommunication with law enforcement. Society also opposes the government’s control of everything they own or possess, as it limits users’ privacy.
The final concern about AI is bias. Even without technology, our world has biased opinions and ideologies. It is known that software has certain biases regarding race, age, and sex, but it’s imperative to know the extent of the bias people face in their lives. For example, algorithms struggle with identifying women compared to men and older adults compared to middle-aged adults (NIST 2019; Grother, Ngan, and Hanaoka 2019). These findings reveal biases in facial recognition systems that prevent safe implementation of these technologies.
Despite concerns, the advancement of technology will cause AI to be more widely used. To prevent the lack of privacy, frequent surveillance, and biases that arise with the usage of AI, ethical artificial intelligence, Ethical AI, is imperative. Ethical AI is a branch of AI that identifies and distinguishes online behavior, digital regulation, privacy, responsibility, and transparency. To ensure online safety and due to backlash, technology companies have started to consider implementing Ethical AI into various softwares, apps, and programming.
Works Cited
Shachar, Carmel, et al. “AI Surveillance during Pandemics: Ethical Implementation Imperatives.” The Hastings Center Report, vol. 50, no. 3, 2020, pp. 18–21. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.1002/hast.1125.
