THE (BUSINESS) ETHICS OF AI REGULATION

Abstract

In the past couple of years, more and more companies have been trying to integrate, within their ethical infrastructure, a varying degree and amount of ethical concerns regarding the development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. As a result, it would not be an exaggeration to say that we have witnessed an explosion of ethics codes concerning AI. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the way in which business organizations have dealt with such concerns. In particular, we first aim to analyze whether companies have a genuine interest in AI ethics or whether it is nothing more than a case of ethics washing, making this whole enterprise virtually useless. We will conclude by advancing an agenda regarding how AI ethical regulations could be empirically assessed, by highlighting a few of the downsides and explaining how different experimental methods could help us close the empirical knowledge gap.