AI, doping and ethics: On why increasing the effectiveness of detecting doping fraud in sport may be morally wrong.

Abstract

In this article, our aim is to show why increasing the effectiveness of detecting doping fraud in sport by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) may be morally wrong. The first argument in favour of this conclusion is that using AI to make a non-ideal antidoping policy even more effective can be morally wrong. Whether the increased effectiveness is morally wrong depends on whether you believe that the current antidoping system administrated by the World Anti-Doping Agency is already morally wrong. The second argument is based on the possibility of scenarios in which a more effective AI system may be morally worse than a less effective but non-AI system. We cannot, of course, conclude that the increased effectiveness of doping detection is always morally wrong. But our point is that whether the introduction of AI to increase detection of doping fraud is a moral improvement depends on the moral plausibility of the current system and the distribution of harm that will follow from false positive and false negative errors.