An Ethical Framework for Guiding the Development of Affectively-Aware Artificial Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper proposes an ethical framework for affectively-aware AI, emphasizing stakeholder responsibilities and guidelines to ensure moral development and deployment of emotionally intelligent machines.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-stakeholder analysis framework with two key pillars—Provable Beneficence and Responsible Stewardship—for guiding ethical AI development.

Findings

Framework clarifies responsibilities of developers and operators.

Defines two ethical pillars: Beneficence and Stewardship.

Provides policy recommendations for ethical AI deployment.

Abstract

The recent rapid advancements in artificial intelligence research and deployment have sparked more discussion about the potential ramifications of socially- and emotionally-intelligent AI. The question is not if research can produce such affectively-aware AI, but when it will. What will it mean for society when machines -- and the corporations and governments they serve -- can "read" people's minds and emotions? What should developers and operators of such AI do, and what should they not do? The goal of this article is to pre-empt some of the potential implications of these developments, and propose a set of guidelines for evaluating the (moral and) ethical consequences of affectively-aware AI, in order to guide researchers, industry professionals, and policy-makers. We propose a multi-stakeholder analysis framework that separates the ethical responsibilities of AI Developers vis-\`a-vis the entities that deploy such AI -- which we term Operators. Our analysis produces two pillars that clarify the responsibilities of each of these stakeholders: Provable Beneficence, which rests on proving the effectiveness of the AI, and Responsible Stewardship, which governs responsible collection, use, and storage of data and the decisions made from such data. We end with recommendations for researchers, developers, operators, as well as regulators and law-makers.