AI Ethics: Now a Thing. Consulting Revenues to Follow
February 3, 2021
Artificial intelligence ethics are a growing concern amongst IT moralists and ethical policy makers. These experts do not want revolutionary AI tools used for evil, but ethical practices for AI are literally…er…literary in movies and books. While books and movies act as touchstones for reality, they still remain works of fiction. Technology Review runs down a list of “responsible AI ventures” in “Worried About AI Ethics? These Startups Are Here To Help.”
It is extremely important for all technology to comply with legal and business standards and business. AI models must be audited before they can be put to work, but the different branches of companies (data scientists, lawyers, and executives) do not speak the same languages. Audits take much longer than necessary. Parity AI is a startup specializing in bias-mitigation tools and explainability platforms to guarantee AI complies with operating procedures or that it is ethical. Parity focuses on helping companies determine risk and impact factors using various AI algorithms and data inputs.
Explainability is another area of AI ethics that is emerging. Explainability is transparency in AI models that explain how they made their decisions. There are two startups that specialize in this:
“[Fiddler] helps data science teams track their models’ evolving performance, and creates high-level reports for business executives based on the results. If a model’s accuracy deteriorates over time, or it shows biased behaviors, Fiddler helps debug why that might be happening. Gade sees monitoring models and improving explainability as the first steps to developing and deploying AI more intentionally.
Arthur, founded in 2019, and Weights & Biases, founded in 2017, are two more companies that offer monitoring platforms. Like Fiddler, Arthur emphasizes explainability and bias mitigation, while Weights & Biases tracks machine-learning experiments to improve research reproducibility. All three companies have observed a gradual shift in companies’ top concerns, from legal compliance or model performance to ethics and responsibility.”
While startups like these could create an ethics ecosystem, there are still ethical concerns with designers. Professor Gang Chen of MIT did not disclose that he shared his nanotechnology researched with China. The United States government is angry and MIT is “deeply distressed.”
Whitney Grace, February 3, 2021
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