How Do Software Companies Deal with Artificial Intelligence Ethics? A Gap Analysis

Abstract

The public and academic discussion on Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics is accelerating and the general public is becoming more aware AI ethics issues such as data privacy in these systems. To guide ethical development of AI systems, governmental and institutional actors, as well as companies, have drafted various guidelines for ethical AI. Though these guidelines are becoming increasingly common, they have been criticized for a lack of impact on industrial practice. There seems to be a gap between research and practice in the area, though its exact nature remains unknown. In this paper, we present a gap analysis of the current state of the art by comparing practices of 39 companies that work with AI systems to the seven key requirements for trustworthy AI presented in the "The Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence". The key finding of this paper is that there is indeed notable gap between AI ethics guidelines and practice. Especially practices considering the novel requirements for software development, requirements of societal and environmental well-being and diversity, nondiscrimination and fairness were not tackled by companies. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software development process management; • Computing methodologies → Artificial intelligence; • Social and professional topics → Codes of ethics.

AI Ethics: An Empirical Study on the Views of Practitioners and Lawmakers

“…Vakkuri et al [37] conducted an industrial survey with 249 practitioners to understand and verify the mentioned research gap based on the EU AI ethics guidelines [2]. The survey results highlight that most of the companies ignored considering the societal and environmental requirements for developing AI systems.…”

“…The reported studies [6], [36], [37], [38] are grounded on empirical findings and fine-granular analysis of extant AI ethics principles and guidelines. To complement empiricism in exploring AI ethics principles and challenges, this study explicitly investigated the principles based on the perceptions of two different types of populations (practitioners and lawmakers).…”

“…Studies [7], [39], [40] are conducted to design various frameworks to operationalize the AI ethics principles; however, no research has yet been done to streamline the plethora of challenges in adopting the widely defined principles and frameworks. Our study preliminarily focused on survey-driven validation of AI ethics principles and challenges by practitioners and lawmakers to complement the body of research comprising the recent industrial studies on AI ethics principles [6], [36], [37], [38] and frameworks [7], [39], [40].…”