Worldwide AI Ethics: a review of 200 guidelines and recommendations for AI governance

TL;DR

This paper conducts a comprehensive review of 200 global AI governance guidelines to identify common ethical principles, aiming to inform future regulations and promote international consensus on AI ethics.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale meta-analysis of worldwide AI ethics guidelines, identifying 17 prevalent principles and creating an open-source database for policy development.

Findings

Identified 17 common ethical principles across guidelines

Highlighted areas of global consensus and divergence

Provided a resource for future AI regulatory efforts

Abstract

The utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) applications has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, bringing forth numerous benefits and conveniences. However, this expansion has also provoked ethical concerns, such as privacy breaches, algorithmic discrimination, security and reliability issues, transparency, and other unintended consequences. To determine whether a global consensus exists regarding the ethical principles that should govern AI applications and to contribute to the formation of future regulations, this paper conducts a meta-analysis of 200 governance policies and ethical guidelines for AI usage published by public bodies, academic institutions, private companies, and civil society organizations worldwide. We identified at least 17 resonating principles prevalent in the policies and guidelines of our dataset, released as an open-source database and tool. We present the limitations of performing a global scale analysis study paired with a critical analysis of our findings, presenting areas of consensus that should be incorporated into future regulatory efforts. All components tied to this work can be found in https://nkluge-correa.github.io/worldwide_AI-ethics/