Towards An Ethics-Audit Bot
This addresses the need for technical solutions to validate ethical soundness in AI governance, but it is incremental as it focuses on conceptual design rather than implementation.
The paper tackles the problem of automating ethics audits for AI systems by proposing a bot that supports organizations in ensuring their software development lifecycles meet ethical standards, without providing specific results or numbers.
In this paper we focus on artificial intelligence (AI) for governance, not governance for AI, and on just one aspect of governance, namely ethics audit. Different kinds of ethical audit bots are possible, but who makes the choices and what are the implications? In this paper, we do not provide ethical/philosophical solutions, but rather focus on the technical aspects of what an AI-based solution for validating the ethical soundness of a target system would be like. We propose a system that is able to conduct an ethical audit of a target system, given certain socio-technical conditions. To be more specific, we propose the creation of a bot that is able to support organisations in ensuring that their software development lifecycles contain processes that meet certain ethical standards.