Since 2016, more than 80 AI ethics documents-including codes, principles, frameworks, and policy strategies-have been produced by corporations, governments, and NGOs. In this paper, we examine three topics of importance related to our ongoing empirical study of ethics and policy issues in these emerging documents. First, we review possible challenges associated with the relative homogeneity of the documents' creators. Second, we provide a novel typology of motivations to characterize both obvious and less obvious goals of the documents. Third, we discuss the varied impacts these documents may have on the AI governance landscape, including what factors are relevant to assessing whether a given document is likely to be successful in achieving its goals. CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Artificial intelligence; • Social and professional topics → Codes of ethics; Government technology policy.

In recent years, numerous public, private, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have produced documents addressing the ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI). These normative documents include principles, frameworks, and policy strategies that articulate the ethical concerns, priorities, and associated strategies of leading organizations and governments around the world. We examined 112 such documents from 25 countries that were produced between 2016 and the middle of 2019. While other studies identified some degree of consensus in such documents, our work highlights meaningful differences across public, private, and non-governmental organizations. We analyzed each document in terms of how many of 25 ethical topics were covered and the depth of discussion for those topics. As compared to documents from private entities, NGO and public sector documents reflect more ethical breadth in the number of topics covered, are more engaged with law and regulation, and are generated through processes that are more participatory. These findings may reveal differences in underlying beliefs about an organization's responsibilities, the relative importance of relying on experts versus including representatives from the public, and the tension between prosocial and economic goals.

Our subject is how the experience of Americans with a certain funding criterion, "broader impacts" (and some similar criteria) may help in efforts to turn the European concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) into a useful guide to funding Europe's scientific and technical research. We believe this comparison may also be as enlightening for Americans concerned with revising research policy. We have organized our report around René Von Schomberg's definition of RRI, since it seems both to cover what the European research group to which we belong is interested in and to be the only widely accepted definition of RRI. According to Von Schomberg, RRI: "… is a transparent, interactive process by which societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view to the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products (in order to allow a proper embedding of scientific and technological advances in our society)." While RRI seeks fundamental changes in the way research is conducted, Broader Impacts is more concerned with more peripheral aspects of research: widening participation of disadvantaged groups, recruiting the next generation of scientists, increasing the speed with which results are used, and so on. Nevertheless, an examination of the broadening of funding criteria over the last four decades suggests that National Science Foundation has been moving in the direction of RRI.

In recent years, numerous public, private, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have produced documents addressing the ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI). These normative documents include principles, frameworks, and policy strategies that articulate the ethical concerns, priorities, and associated strategies of leading organizations and governments around the world. We examined 112 such documents from 25 countries that were produced between 2016 and the middle of 2019. While other studies identified some degree of consensus in such documents, our work highlights meaningful differences across public, private, and non-governmental organizations. We analyzed each document in terms of how many of 25 ethical topics were covered and the depth of discussion for those topics. As compared to documents from private entities, NGO and public sector documents reflect more ethical breadth in the number of topics covered, are more engaged with law and regulation, and are generated through processes that are more participatory. These findings may reveal differences in underlying beliefs about an organization’s responsibilities, the relative importance of relying on experts versus including representatives from the public, and the tension between prosocial and economic goals.<div><br></div><div>[This article is an accepted version. The final published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1109/TTS.2021.3052127. © 2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.]</div>

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