The Ethics of AI Ethics -- An Evaluation of Guidelines

TL;DR

This paper critically evaluates various AI ethics guidelines, comparing their principles and assessing their practical implementation to identify gaps and suggest improvements for aligning AI development with ethical standards.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of existing AI ethics guidelines, highlighting overlaps, omissions, and evaluating their real-world application and effectiveness.

Findings

Identifies common principles across guidelines

Highlights gaps and omissions in current standards

Assesses implementation and suggests improvements

Abstract

Current advances in research, development and application of artificial intelligence (AI) systems have yielded a far-reaching discourse on AI ethics. In consequence, a number of ethics guidelines have been released in recent years. These guidelines comprise normative principles and recommendations aimed to harness the "disruptive" potentials of new AI technologies. Designed as a comprehensive evaluation, this paper analyzes and compares these guidelines highlighting overlaps but also omissions. As a result, I give a detailed overview of the field of AI ethics. Finally, I also examine to what extent the respective ethical principles and values are implemented in the practice of research, development and application of AI systems - and how the effectiveness in the demands of AI ethics can be improved.