Reporting on Decision-Making Algorithms and some Related Ethical Questions

TL;DR

This paper examines how companies report on AI-related risks and ethics within integrated reports, highlighting the lack of transparency and recent efforts to establish global ethical frameworks for AI.

Contribution

It analyzes current reporting practices on AI ethics and risks, and discusses the gap between initiatives for ethical AI and corporate disclosure behaviors.

Findings

Companies are reluctant to report AI ethics and risks.

Recent stakeholder initiatives aim to create global AI ethical frameworks.

There is a significant reporting gap on AI-related ethical issues.

Abstract

Companies report on their financial performance for decades. More recently they have also started to report on their environmental impact and their social responsibility. The latest trend is now to deliver one single integrated report where all stakeholders of the company can easily connect all facets of the business with their impact considered in a broad sense. The main purpose of this integrated approach is to avoid delivering data related to disconnected silos, which consequently makes it very difficult to globally assess the overall performance of an entity or a business line. In this paper, we focus on how companies report on risks and ethical issues related to the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We explain some of these risks and potential issues. Next, we identify some recent initiatives by various stakeholders to define a global ethical framework for AI. Finally, we illustrate with four cases that companies are very shy to report on these facets of AI.