Kaptur interview: 10 questions for an AI ethicist

Paul Melcher asked me 10 AI ethics questions and gave me an opportunity to address questions that are on the minds of many.

➤ You can find the interview here

➤ These are the questions I answered:

1. Who am I and what do I do?

2. Are machines fundamentally bad? Why do we need to define ethical rules for them to follow?

3. If they are intelligent, shouldn’t they know right from wrong?

4. Ethics can be perceived as tied to culture and changing over time. How do you define and set rules that work for the whole world and for all time?

5. Ethics is tied to consequence. An action unethical value is measured based on the resulting consequences. How do you infer this when you program a machine to generate images?

6. Ethics can be used as an instrument of censorship and oppression. Who watches the watchers?

7. In the same process as you have with GAN, could we imagine a Generative adversarial network that would challenge content based on ethical outcomes and only certify those who are successful? In other words, give your job to an AI?

8. A lot of conversations about ethics and AI turn around how AI our trained. In the sense that if the training data is “ethically clean”, the resulting AI will also behave ethically. Is that your position as well?

9. Are we demanding and expecting more from AI than from human beings? Are we less tolerable when a machine breaks the rules than when humans do the same? If so, why?

10. Should there be an ethics tribunal for AI?

Thank you, Paul Melcher!