Towards An Ethics-Audit Bot

TL;DR

This paper explores the development of an AI-based ethics audit bot designed to evaluate and support ethical standards in software development processes within organizations.

Contribution

It proposes a technical framework for an AI system capable of conducting ethical audits of software development lifecycles, focusing on implementation rather than philosophical debate.

Findings

Conceptual system design for an ethics-audit bot

Identification of socio-technical conditions for ethical auditing

Potential for supporting organizations in ethical compliance

Abstract

In this paper we focus on artificial intelligence (AI) for governance, not governance for AI, and on just one aspect of governance, namely ethics audit. Different kinds of ethical audit bots are possible, but who makes the choices and what are the implications? In this paper, we do not provide ethical/philosophical solutions, but rather focus on the technical aspects of what an AI-based solution for validating the ethical soundness of a target system would be like. We propose a system that is able to conduct an ethical audit of a target system, given certain socio-technical conditions. To be more specific, we propose the creation of a bot that is able to support organisations in ensuring that their software development lifecycles contain processes that meet certain ethical standards.