Abstract
The utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) applications has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, bringing forth numerous benefits and conveniences. However, this expansion has also provoked ethical concerns, such as privacy breaches, algorithmic discrimination, security and reliability issues, transparency, and other unintended consequences. To determine whether a global consensus exists regarding the ethical principles that should govern AI applications and to contribute to the formation of future regulations, this paper conducts a meta-analysis of 200 governance policies and ethical guidelines for AI usage published by public bodies, academic institutions, private companies, and civil society organizations worldwide. We identified at least 17 resonating principles prevalent in the policies and guidelines of our dataset, released as an open source database and tool. We present the limitations of performing a global-scale analysis study paired with a critical analysis of our findings, presenting areas of consensus that should be incorporated into future regulatory efforts.
•Significant growth in AI research and industry has led to an “AI ethics boom”•Much of the normative discourse in AI ethics comes as guidelines•A thorough description of these guidelines remains lacking•We present a descriptive analysis of 200 AI guidelines in an open source fashion
After the AI winter in the late 80s, AI research has experienced remarkable growth. Currently, a lot of work is taking place to define the values and ideas that should guide AI advances. A key challenge, however, lies in establishing a consensus on these values, given the diverse perspectives of various stakeholders worldwide and the abstraction of normative discourse. Researchers and policy makers need better tools to catalog and compare AI governance documents from around the world and to identify points of divergence and commonality.
Given the rising hype surrounding AI, much attention has been given to the question “what values should guide this development?” From moratoriums to the AI industry to endless lists of principles, it is easy to get lost in this normative discourse. Hence, to help determine whether a global consensus exists regarding our values concerning AI, this paper conducts a meta-analysis of 200 governance policies and guidelines for AI usage published by different stakeholders worldwide.