5 Dangerous Myths About AI Ethics You Shouldn’t Believe; Forbes, May 14, 2025

Bernard Marr , Forbes; 5 Dangerous Myths About AI Ethics You Shouldn’t Believe

"AI can empower just about any business to innovate and drive efficiency, but it also has the potential to do damage and cause harm. This means that everyone putting it to use needs to understand the ethical frameworks in place to keep everyone safe.

At the end of the day, AI is a tool. AI ethics can be thought of as the safety warning you get in big letters at the front of any user manual, setting out some firm dos and don’ts about using it.

Using AI almost always involves making ethical choices. In a business setting, understanding the many ways it can affect people and culture means we have the best information for making those choices.

It’s a subject there's still a lot of confusion around, not least involving who is responsible and who should be ensuring this gets done. So here are five common misconceptions I come across involving the ethics of generative AI and machine learning."

COVID-19 first target of new AI research consortium; Berkeley News, March 26, 2020

Sarah Yang, College of Engineering, Berkeley News; COVID-19 first target of new AI research consortium

"The University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) are the headquarters of a bold new research consortium established by enterprise AI software company C3.ai to leverage the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and the internet of things (IoT) to transform societal-scale systems.

C3.ai announced the creation of the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (C3.ai DTI) today, along with a call for research proposals for AI techniques to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 and possible future pandemics.

“The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute is a consortium of leading scientists, researchers, innovators and executives from academia and industry, joining forces to accelerate the social and economic benefits of digital transformation,” said Thomas M. Siebel, CEO of C3.ai, in a statement. “We have the opportunity through public-private partnership to change the course of a global pandemic. I cannot imagine a more important use of AI.”

The first call for proposals, due May 1, 2020, targets research that addresses the application of AI and machine learning to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, rigorous approaches to design sampling and testing strategies, and methods to improve societal resilience in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, among other areas relevant to pandemic mitigation."

How Machine Learning Pushes Us to Define Fairness; Harvard Business Review, November 6, 2019

David Weinberger, Harvard Business Review; How Machine Learning Pushes Us to Define Fairness

"Even with the greatest of care, an ML system might find biased patterns so subtle and complex that they hide from the best-intentioned human attention. Hence the necessary current focus among computer scientists, policy makers, and anyone concerned with social justice on how to keep bias out of AI. 

Yet machine learning’s very nature may also be bringing us to think about fairness in new and productive ways. Our encounters with machine learning (ML) are beginning to  give us concepts, a vocabulary, and tools that enable us to address questions of bias and fairness more directly and precisely than before."

A face-scanning algorithm increasingly decides whether you deserve the job; The Washington Post, October 22, 2019

Drew Harwell, The Washington Post; A face-scanning algorithm increasingly decides whether you deserve the job 

HireVue claims it uses artificial intelligence to decide who’s best for a job. Outside experts call it ‘profoundly disturbing.’

"“It’s a profoundly disturbing development that we have proprietary technology that claims to differentiate between a productive worker and a worker who isn’t fit, based on their facial movements, their tone of voice, their mannerisms,” said Meredith Whittaker, a co-founder of the AI Now Institute, a research center in New York...

Loren Larsen, HireVue’s chief technology officer, said that such criticism is uninformed and that “most AI researchers have a limited understanding” of the psychology behind how workers think and behave...

“People are rejected all the time based on how they look, their shoes, how they tucked in their shirts and how ‘hot’ they are,” he told The Washington Post. “Algorithms eliminate most of that in a way that hasn’t been possible before.”...

HireVue’s growth, however, is running into some regulatory snags. In August, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed a first-in-the-nation law that will force employers to tell job applicants how their AI-hiring system works and get their consent before running them through the test. The measure, which HireVue said it supports, will take effect Jan. 1."

The Legal and Ethical Implications of Using AI in Hiring; Harvard Business Review, April 25, 2019

Ben Dattner, 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, 

Richard Buchband, 

Lucinda Schettler

, Harvard Business Review; 

The Legal and Ethical Implications of Using AI in Hiring

"Using AI, big data, social media, and machine learning, employers will have ever-greater access to candidates’ private lives, private attributes, and private challenges and states of mind. There are no easy answers to many of the new questions about privacy we have raised here, but we believe that they are all worthy of public discussion and debate."

Universities Rush to Roll Out Computer Science Ethics Courses; New York Times, February 12, 2018

Natasha Singer, New York Times; Universities Rush to Roll Out Computer Science Ethics Courses

"The medical profession has an ethic: First, do no harm.

Silicon Valley has an ethos: Build it first and ask for forgiveness later.

Now, in the wake of fake news and other troubles at tech companies, universities that helped produce some of Silicon Valley’s top technologists are hustling to bring a more medicine-like morality to computer science...

“Stanford absolutely has a responsibility to play a leadership role in integrating these perspectives, but so does Carnegie Mellon and Caltech and Berkeley and M.I.T.,” said Jeremy Weinstein, a Stanford political science professor and co-developer of the ethics course. “The set of institutions that are generating the next generation of leaders in the technology sector have all got to get on this train.”"

Exclusive: Theresa May to announce ethical oversight of AI used to drive cars, diagnose patients and even sentence criminals; The Telegraph, January 22, 2018

Steven Swinford, The Telegraph; 

Exclusive: Theresa May to announce ethical oversight of AI used to drive cars, diagnose patients and even sentence criminals

"The Prime Minister is expected to use her keynote speech at a summit of World leaders in Davos on Thursday to discuss the opportunities and ethical challenges presented by the rise of artificial intelligence.

Ministers believe that Britain has the chance to become a World leader in artificial intelligence, just as it currently is in other cutting-edge technologies such as genomics.

However there are significant concerns that computer algorithms could end up making critical ethical decisions without human oversight."