The Only Way is Ethics: A Guide to Ethical Research with Large Language Models

TL;DR

This paper presents 'LLM Ethics Whitepaper', a comprehensive, practical guide for NLP practitioners to navigate ethical considerations in large language model research, translating literature into actionable recommendations.

Contribution

It introduces a unified, accessible resource that consolidates ethical guidelines, toolkits, and literature review into a practical guide for LLM research.

Findings

Provides clear Do's and Don'ts for ethical LLM research

Identifies useful toolkits for ethical evaluation

Offers a structured project lifecycle discussion

Abstract

There is a significant body of work looking at the ethical considerations of large language models (LLMs): critiquing tools to measure performance and harms; proposing toolkits to aid in ideation; discussing the risks to workers; considering legislation around privacy and security etc. As yet there is no work that integrates these resources into a single practical guide that focuses on LLMs; we attempt this ambitious goal. We introduce 'LLM Ethics Whitepaper', which we provide as an open and living resource for NLP practitioners, and those tasked with evaluating the ethical implications of others' work. Our goal is to translate ethics literature into concrete recommendations and provocations for thinking with clear first steps, aimed at computer scientists. 'LLM Ethics Whitepaper' distils a thorough literature review into clear Do's and Don'ts, which we present also in this paper. We likewise identify useful toolkits to support ethical work. We refer the interested reader to the full LLM Ethics Whitepaper, which provides a succinct discussion of ethical considerations at each stage in a project lifecycle, as well as citations for the hundreds of papers from which we drew our recommendations. The present paper can be thought of as a pocket guide to conducting ethical research with LLMs.