Given the complexity of teams involved in creating AI-based systems, how can we understand who should be held accountable when they fail? This paper reports findings about accountable AI from 26 interviews conducted with stakeholders in AI drawn from the fields of AI research, law, and policy. Participants described the challenges presented by the distributed nature of how AI systems are designed, developed, deployed, and regulated. This distribution of agency, alongside existing mechanisms of accountability, responsibility, and liability, creates barriers for (...) effective accountable design. As agency is distributed across the socio-technical landscape of an AI system, users without deep knowledge of the operation of these systems become disempowered, unable to challenge or contest when it impacts their lives. In this context, accountability becomes a matter of building systems that can be challenged, interrogated, and, most importantly, adjusted in use to accommodate counter-intuitive results and unpredictable impacts. Thus, accountable system design can work to reconfigure socio-technical landscapes to protect the users of AI and to prevent unjust apportionment of risk. (shrink)

In an era of technological ubiquity, artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping not only industries but also fundamental human experiences, including artistic creativity. Rooted in a Posthumanist theoretical framework, this research scrutinizes the intricate ethical and aesthetic challenges that artists confront in AI-enabled art creation, with a particular focus on a novel phenomenon we term 'aesthetic loss of control.’ This phenomenon bears significant implications for notions of authorship, copyright, and business ethics in the art industry. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, our study (...) involves a six-month-long collaboration with 34 artists from diverse artistic and cultural milieus, facilitated by AI algorithms versed in an array of artistic styles. Through iterative cycles of human input and AI output, coupled with in-depth interviews, observational studies, and diary analyses, we meticulously document the artists’ experiences and their emerging doubts over authorship and creative control. Our findings illuminate the nuanced complexities surrounding this 'aesthetic loss of control,’ extending current discussions in business ethics by offering empirically grounded insights and recommendations for navigating these ethical dilemmas. The study not only contributes new theoretical perspectives to the discourse but also provides actionable ethical guidelines for stakeholders in the art industry's commercial ecosystem. (shrink)

The use of AI in weapons systems raises numerous ethical issues. To date, work on weaponized AI has tended to be theoretical and normative in nature, consisting in critical policy analyses and ethical considerations, carried out by philosophers, legal scholars, and political scientists. However, adequately addressing the cultural and social dimensions of technology requires insights and methods from empirical moral and cultural psychology. To do so, this position piece describes the motivations for and sketches the nature of a normative, cultural (...) psychology of weaponized AI. The motivations for this project include the increasingly global, cross-cultural and international, nature of technologies, and counter-intuitive nature of normative thoughts and behaviors. The nature of this project consists in developing standardized measures of AI ethical reasoning and intuitions, coupled with questions exploring the development of norms, administered and validated across different cultural groups and disciplinary contexts. The goal of this piece is not to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the cultural facets and psychological dimensions of weaponized AI but, rather, to outline in broad terms the contours of an emerging research agenda. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence can be a game changer to address the global challenge of humanity-threatening climate change by fostering sustainable development. Since chemical research and development lay the foundation for innovative products and solutions, this study presents a novel chemical research and development process backed with artificial intelligence and guiding ethical principles to account for both process- and outcome-related sustainability. Particularly in ethically salient contexts, ethical principles have to accompany research and development powered by artificial intelligence to promote social and environmental (...) good and sustainability while preventing any harm for all stakeholders affected. (shrink)