Corporate Governance of Artificial Intelligence in the Public Interest

Abstract

Corporations play a major role in artificial intelligence (AI) research, development, and deployment, with profound consequences for society. This paper surveys opportunities to improve how corporations govern their AI activities so as to better advance the public interest. The paper focuses on the roles of and opportunities for a wide range of actors inside the corporation—managers, workers, and investors—and outside the corporation—corporate partners and competitors, industry consortia, nonprofit organizations, the public, the media, and governments. Whereas prior work on multistakeholder AI governance has proposed dedicated institutions to bring together diverse actors and stakeholders, this paper explores the opportunities they have even in the absence of dedicated multistakeholder institutions. The paper illustrates these opportunities with many cases, including the participation of Google in the U.S. Department of Defense Project Maven; the publication of potentially harmful AI research by OpenAI, with input from the Partnership on AI; and the sale of facial recognition technology to law enforcement by corporations including Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. These and other cases demonstrate the wide range of mechanisms to advance AI corporate governance in the public interest, especially when diverse actors work together.

Achieving a ‘Good AI Society’: Comparing the Aims and Progress of the EU and the US

“…Without government regulatory oversight, there is a significant risk of harm through ethics washing or shopping, with the effectiveness of private sector principles questionable (Hagendorff, 2020). Market mechanisms, such as pressure from consumers, employees and investors may check some unethical practices (Cihon et al, 2021). Indeed, some commentators have been positive about the establishment of AI ethics boards within big American technology firms (Newman, 2020).…”

Defining organizational AI governance

“…Cihon et al [26], investigating corporate governance of AI, come close to our focus area and provide actor-specific means of improving AI governance. However, they do not explicitly define AI governance.…”

“…However, they do not explicitly define AI governance. Moreover, their study focuses on large corporations at the forefront of AI development, such as Alphabet and Amazon, and how they can better govern AI to serve the public interest [26]. In our effort to define organizational AI governance, we also aim to include smaller organizations that use AI systems but do not exercise such leverage over global AI technology development.…”

Digitalization of Institutions of Corporate Law: Current Trends and Future Prospects

“…Most of the scientific research is mainly devoted to the problems of digital corporate governance (Vermeulen 2015;Yermack 2017;Charan 2011;Adizes 2004;Charan 2011;Chekhovskaya 2018a;Fenwick and Vermeulen 2019;Gandía 2005;Yankovskiy and Yendutkin 2020). Research on digital corporate governance also summarizes the practice of using technologies such as e-voting (Gao et al 2020;Mellon et al 2017;Shukla et al 2018;Trubochkina and Poliakov 2019), blockchain technology (Alekseev 2018;Egorova et al 2019;Fenwick and Vermeulen 2019;Laptev 2019;Sannikova 2019;Yermack 2017), artificial intelligence (Cihon et al 2021;Dignam 2020;Erel et al 2018;Möslein 2018), etc. In addition, the authors also analyzed individual scientific studies on the functioning and practice of using blockchain technology and artificial intelligence in various spheres of public life (Beck 2018;Blemus 2017;Buterin 2014;De Filippi and Wright 2018;Dhillon et al 2017;Domingos 2015;Feijóo et al 2020;Fersht and Slaby 2012;Goertzel 2016;Hsieh et al 2018;Polge et al 2021).…”

“…Also in the doctrine, in addition to the concept of AI, there is the concept AI system lifecycle, i.e., the sequence of activities that take an AI system from its initial conception to its final use (Cihon et al 2021). Attention to the lifecycle can help identify and clarify opportunities to improve AI corporate governance.…”