I should also add that there is an abundance of AI startup founders that are totally oblivious to the rising tide of calls for Ethical AI. Those that are in their own techie fog are utterly unaware that anyone cares about AI ethics, to begin with. As such, you can decidedly bet that such an AI startup is not going to give any air time to including Ethical AI precepts.
Their study surveyed a bit over two hundred AI-related startups and asked the firms about the awareness and embracing of Ethical AI at their firm. The good news is that about half of the respondents said they do have Ethical AI precepts in-house. That actually is somewhat surprising in that just a few years ago the odds were that a much lower percentage would have been so armed.
We have about half that apparently got the memo about embracing AI ethics, though some portion of them are possibly doing so merely as a checkmark to tout that they are all-in on Ethical AI. Then we have roughly the other half that has not seemingly adopted AI ethics.
The question arises as to how we can substantiate that an AI startup is in fact abiding by Ethical AI principles. This is a lot harder to establish than it might seem at first glance. One way to figure this out would be to dive into AI coding and see if we can find a programmatic embrace of AI ethics. Likewise, we could try testing the AI system to see if it violates AI ethics. All in all, this is a tech-oriented means of seeking to discern adherence to Ethical AI.
We need to be careful though in leaping to unfair reasoning in such matters. An AI startup from the get-go may have fueled Ethical AI into its entire being. In that case, they might not, later on, have to incur any costly AI ethics-oriented choices. We would therefore be somewhat misleadingly inferring that if they don’t have those subsequent costly actions, they aren’t truly serious about Ethical AI. This is a form of what is sometimes referred to as survivor bias.