Artificial Intelligence (AI) is embedded in everyday life, business, government, medicine and more. In order to trust these systems, it is of great importance that they respect ethical principles. As stated by IBM (one of the oldest IT companies, and one that has a vast history in working with AI), only by embedding ethical principles into AI applications and processes can we build trustworthy systems. The importance of ethics in the Artificial Intelligence field is widely recognized, and on 24 November 2021 UNESCO’s General Conference, during its 41st session, adopted the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. The main areas that are debated as regards AI ethics are: privacy and surveillance; manipulation of behaviour; opacity of AI systems; bias in decision systems; human-robot interaction; automation and employment; autonomous systems; machine ethics; artificial moral agents; and singularity. For example, IBM grounds its approach to AI ethics on three basic principles: (1) the purpose of AI is to augment human intelligence; (2) data and insights belong to their creators; (3) new technology, including AI systems, must be transparent and explainable.
Looking at the use of AI in news organizations, we see that transparency is a core issue when it comes to AI ethics. Algorithm transparency and accountability is an important discussion point. It is not easy to discuss AI boundaries, even though this is not a new subject, as they already were a topic of debate in the last century. While at that time AI applications were more limited to academic and technological environments, today AI is embedded in our daily lives, making the subject more important each day.
