Let's start with a definition about what ethical AI is. What ethical AI does is it seeks to promote fairness, minimize harm and align AI with human values and well-being. And if I'm a designer and I'm working in ethical AI, one of the questions that I really want to ask is how do I design artificially intelligent systems that follow ethical principles and society. When we think about the practice of building AI systems,
ethical AI is that practice that follows ethical and moral standards in society. But it is dynamic, right? As AI changes, ethical AI must change to keep momentum and to keep pace with the advent of AI technology. So one of the big questions that ethical AI asks as a bird's eye perspective of what AI is is what are the legitimate and illegitimate uses of A.I.?
One of the things that we talk about a lot in ethical AI is transparency which basically sounds is exactly what it sounds like. You're allowing users to understand how decisions are made in the AI systems that they're using. So, this and this really what it does is it builds trust with the user and it builds that relationship where it enables the user to really assess how the system behavior (It has a behavior for bias and fairness).
And it really allows them to see, you know, like what's going on in the background when they're using these AI systems. There’s accountability, which is basically that the designers, the developers, the organizations, basically every stakeholder that has some sort of stake in the matter, whether and even users, they should be held accountable for the impact and consequences of AI systems. So this means things like ease of troubleshooting,
ease of understanding, maybe for errors are there how to address those errors. Like those mechanisms should all be included within the system, within the AI system that they're using. And then there's fairness. So, outcomes should be fair and equitable for users. And by mitigating bias and addressing disparities in AI outcomes, this can be achieved. Definitely, easier said than done, as we'll see in a bit.
But this is the whole concept of just making sure that things are equitable and that outcomes aren't biased or favored towards one demographic or one region or one area or person or industry based off of another. or one region or one area or person or industry based off of another. And privacy. So, individuals have rights on their privacy and data, right? Especially we've been through a lot of like consumer data laws. So, the whole concept is built upon like these systems have to be built
to handle user privacy and data in a secure and ethical manner. And information should definitely be obtained consensually, which not only means that, like me, as a user, I'm giving my data and consenting to my data being given. But I also understand what it means to permission a system to to have my data. Like are they going to sell it? What are they going to do with it? I should, as a user, should have a very thorough understanding of that. And so that understanding should be accessible amongst everyone.
That's basically the idea of privacy and ethical AI.