In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) development has increased rapidly. Technology has steadily been integrated into the economic and industrial worlds and everyday life in South Africa and worldwide to make our daily activities more convenient and straightforward. Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular for agents to provide better customer care. At the same time, AI in marketing may help determine the optimal moment to engage with a customer via email or social media.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent, we must evaluate its political, economic, societal, and, most crucially, ethical ramifications. According to recent research by Microsoft and tax consulting services firm EY, nearly half of South African businesses are already experimenting with AI. Almost all local firms believe that applying AI–driven solutions to optimize their operations in the future will result in considerable financial gains.
It’s critical to create the framework to avoid future situations where machines make decisions that affect people, such as biases that pick out or exclude people based on race or gender. The most significant difficulty when deploying AI driven solutions is avoiding leveraging consumer data to make judgments that exacerbate prejudices and cause harm in the “real world.”
Failure to establish ethical frameworks to address issues that may arise in the gathering and processing personal data can hurt a company’s reputation and cause consumers direct and possibly irreversible harm.
Before we understand how businesses use ethical AI, let’s know its definition first.
What Does Ethical AI Entail?
The ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be viewed from a variety of angles. There are significant philosophical concerns to consider and futuristic forecasts like the “singularity.” There are also science-fiction-like scenarios for what might happen if an AI system became “aware,” allowing it to teach itself whatever it wanted rather than just what it was intended to learn. Then there’s human morality related to the design and creation of sentient machines.
Here are three ways businesses might begin to build an ethical culture into AI:
Form A Diversified Team
To limit the impact of systemic socioeconomic disparities in Artificial Intelligence (AI) data, stakeholders must be involved at every level of the product development life cycle. Because employees come from all backgrounds and have varied experiences, this prevents bias. Having a mixed team allows employees to learn about different ways of doing things, which increases innovation.
Be Open And Honest
You must be honest with yourself, your customers, and the community to be ethical. Understanding your principles, establishing who benefits and pays, giving users ownership over their data, and respecting other people’s ideas are all part of this. Employees should be aware of the importance of maintaining user privacy if it is a core company value. Customers and the general public should also be mindful of how different security measures affect privacy. Finally, consumers must have the ability to update or erase data that has been acquired about them. We must recognize that client data access is a privilege, not a right.
Exclusion Must Be Abolished
We can achieve this by being more inclusive and avoiding all forms of bigotry. To do so, it’s crucial to tread carefully when making decisions based on demographics. Even when stereotype-based customization or targeting is precise, potential customers may be neglected or upset unintentionally. We must eradicate this bias incorporating processes or decision-making before using the data to train other Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Employee education, product development, and consumer training are three main ways businesses can do this.
Conclusion
AI is all around us, and it has had a significant positive impact on our lives. However, it has the potential to be a serious global threat. Artificial Intelligence imitates human intelligence and can learn independently with minimal programming in its most evolved forms. Many engineers agree that many programs require them to “sit back and see what the machine accomplishes.”
There’s also a growing realization that women and people of minorities need to be better represented on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics teams. Professional organizations like Black In Computing and the Algorithmic Justice League are increasing awareness of the negative impact that this mainly white and male-dominated sector may have on communities of color.
We need AI to be accurate for economic success and the sake of society, which entails eliminating as many biases as feasible. Fair and precise data sets are the responsibility of organizations; it’s a constant endeavor that needs awareness, investment, and commitment, but it’s unquestionably vital.
So, if you wish to know more about ethical artificial intelligence, contact ONPASSIVE team.
