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Deloitte recently published a new report about how organizations are approaching the ethics of emerging technologies, and you know generative AI is moving fast when even experts have to play catch-up.
Within the last year, we’ve witnessed a slew of rapid generative AI developments, all of which pose new ethical questions about plagiarism, misinformation, and worker displacement.
When Deloitte first published its “State of Ethics and Trust in Technology” report in 2022, “the state of artificial intelligence had been relatively stable over the past five years,” the new report’s authors note.
But we’re living in an entirely new world of AI, and how organizations are thinking about the ethics of technology is also changing fast.
Double-edged sword. From a survey of 1,716 business and tech professionals actively working with emerging tech, Deloitte found that cognitive technologies, which include generative AI, was inspiring the most optimism—but also the most potential worry: 39% of executives said cognitive tech had the most potential for generating social good, yet it also ranked highest, at 57%, for potentially serious ethical risk.
The main concerns that executives had with AI were data privacy, in which “machine learning-based language models can inadvertently leak information from the data used to train them;” transparency, given the complexity of how AI arrives at particular outputs; and data poisoning, when data training sets are “deliberately…‘polluted’ by hackers and other bad actors.”
Perhaps surprisingly, job displacement ranked relatively low on executives’ list of concerns. But that might be because many workers weren’t entirely eliminated: Among respondents with employees displaced by AI, 49% said their workers had moved to different roles and were “retrained and upskilled.” 13% said employees moved to other roles without upskilling or retraining, and only 11% said workers were terminated. Meanwhile, 27% said no workers at their orgs were displaced by AI.
Should their orgs make any “ethical missteps” with respect to new technology, survey respondents said they’d be most concerned about reputational and human damage (38% and 27%, respectively). Just 17% were concerned about regulatory penalties, and only 9% worried about financial damage or employee dissatisfaction.