Big Tech slams ethics brakes on AI

In September last year, Google's cloud unit looked into using artificial intelligence to help a financial firm decide whom to lend money to.

It turned down the client's idea after weeks of internal discussions, deeming the project too ethically dicey because the AI technology could perpetuate biases like those around race and gender.

Since early last year, Google has also blocked new AI features analyzing emotions, fearing cultural insensitivity, while Microsoft restricted software mimicking voices and IBM rejected a client request for an advanced facial-recognition system.

All these technologies were curbed by panels of executives or other leaders, according to interviews with AI ethics chiefs at the three US technology giants.

Reported here for the first time, their vetoes and the deliberations that led to them reflect a nascent industry-wide drive to balance the pursuit of lucrative AI systems with a greater consideration of social responsibility.

"There are opportunities and harms, and our job is to maximize opportunities and minimize harms," said Tracy Pizzo Frey, who sits on two ethics committees at Google Cloud as its managing director for Responsible AI.

Judgments can be difficult.

Microsoft, for instance, had to balance the benefit of using its voice mimicry tech to restore impaired people's speech against risks such as enabling political deepfakes, said Natasha Crampton, the company's chief responsible AI officer.

Rights activists say decisions with potentially broad consequences for society should not be made internally alone. They argue ethics committees cannot be truly independent and their public transparency is limited by competitive pressures.

Jascha Galaski, advocacy officer at Civil Liberties Union for Europe, views external oversight as the way forward, and US and European authorities are indeed drawing rules for the fledgling area.

If companies' AI ethics committees "really become transparent and independent – and this is all very utopist – then this could be even better than any other solution, but I don't think it's realistic," Galaski said.