Minimum Viable Ethics: From Institutionalizing Industry AI Governance to Product Impact

TL;DR

This paper investigates how AI ethics professionals in industry attempt to implement ethics in products, revealing a pragmatic approach that results in minimal ethical scope due to organizational power constraints.

Contribution

It uncovers the strategies and challenges faced by AI ethics professionals in translating ethics principles into product impact within corporate environments.

Findings

AI ethics professionals are highly agile and opportunistic.

They leverage narratives of regulation and quality assurance.

Their efforts lead to a minimal, compliance-focused ethics scope.

Abstract

Across the technology industry, many companies have expressed their commitments to AI ethics and created dedicated roles responsible for translating high-level ethics principles into product. Yet it is unclear how effective this has been in leading to meaningful product changes. Through semi-structured interviews with 26 professionals working on AI ethics in industry, we uncover challenges and strategies of institutionalizing ethics work along with translation into product impact. We ultimately find that AI ethics professionals are highly agile and opportunistic, as they attempt to create standardized and reusable processes and tools in a corporate environment in which they have little traditional power. In negotiations with product teams, they face challenges rooted in their lack of authority and ownership over product, but can push forward ethics work by leveraging narratives of regulatory response and ethics as product quality assurance. However, this strategy leaves us with a minimum viable ethics, a narrowly scoped industry AI ethics that is limited in its capacity to address normative issues separate from compliance or product quality. Potential future regulation may help bridge this gap.