Paper #1 – AI ethics and its side-effects (Link)
I wrote a critical article about my own discipline, AI ethics, in which I argue that the assumption that AI ethics automatically decrease the likelihood of unethical outcomes in the AI field is flawed. The article lists risks that either originate from AI ethicists themselves or from the consequences their embedding in AI organizations has. The compilation of risks comprises psychological considerations concerning the cognitive biases of AI ethicists themselves as well as biased reactions to their work, subject-specific and knowledge constraints AI ethicists often succumb to, negative side effects of ethics audits for AI applications, and many more.
Paper #2 – A virtue-based framework for AI ethics (Link)
Many ethics initiatives have stipulated standards for good technology development in the AI sector. I contribute to that endeavor by proposing a new approach that is based on virtue ethics. It defines four “basic AI virtues”, namely justice, honesty, responsibility, and care, all of which represent specific motivational settings that constitute the very precondition for ethical decision-making in the AI field. Moreover, it defines two “second-order AI virtues”, prudence and fortitude, that bolster achieving the basic virtues by helping with overcoming bounded ethicality or hidden psychological forces that can impair ethical decision making and that are hitherto disregarded in AI ethics. Lastly, the paper describes measures for successfully cultivating the mentioned virtues in organizations dealing with AI research and development.
Paper #3 – Ethical and methodological challenges in building morally informed AI systems (Link)
Recent progress in large language models has led to applications that can (at least) simulate possession of full moral agency due to their capacity to report context-sensitive moral assessments in open-domain conversations. However, automating moral decision-making faces several methodological as well as ethical challenges. In the paper, we comment on all these challenges and provide critical considerations for future research on full artificial moral agency.