Ethical dilemmas of artificial intelligence

The artificial intelligence has burst onto the scene in more fields than we might think, and it is here to stay. However, the introduction of AI into some facets of human life has generated controversies and ethical dilemmas that need to be addressed in order to more rigorously profile what role AI should play in our society. Even international organisations such as UNESCO have expressed their views on this issue.

Do you think AI could help a judge decide on a verdict, would AI-aided history education content tell the story objectively, should AI be able to collect data indiscriminately regardless of its nature, do AI artistic creations with software such as DALL-e not have an author, and in this article we will get your brain thinking about the ethical dilemmas that AI presents today!

The importance of AI ethics

Addressing the ethical dilemmas of artificial intelligence is crucial for society and its future. The growing presence of AI in areas such as health, transportation and employment demands that its decisions be ethical and respect human rights. Therefore, clear responsibilities and transparency in the AI decision-making process need to be established so that users understand how AI works and what its real scope is.

That is why, below, we are going to talk in detail about the ethical dilemmas that are being addressed today and to which technology giants and government institutions have to respond.

Ethical dilemmas of AI

These are the ethical issues of AI related to the world of work, productivity, crime, big-picture decision-making, privacy and justice:

AI and the elimination of jobs

Let us not err on the side of naivety. If companies are betting on artificial intelligence, it is not only to provide a more satisfactory customer experience, to make better business decisions and to optimise work processes. 

Many entrepreneurs are keeping an eye on artificial intelligence advances because of its potential to devalue the tasks that many workers perform, The Commission's role in this area is not to replace its functions in their entirety, if not to replace them.

Of course, there are jobs that are most likely to be replaced by AI, These could be the more manual jobs in agriculture, logistics, some areas of digital marketing or translation. That is why if AI manages to gain a significant foothold in some sectors, there will be a significant number of jobs that companies will do without.

It is therefore necessary to consider what would be done if AI were to cause a massive wave of layoffs and a higher unemployment rate.

Taxation of AI

Linked to the previous thematic block, another moral objection is the sharing of profits that a company can generate thanks to AI and its taxation. If part of the workforce are robots or autonomous AI machines, how should the employer be taxed for these profits, should he or she pay something?

After all, machines are not real workers with their own needs and limitations. But on the other hand, the entrepreneur is exploiting a highly advanced means of production in order to maximise his revenues Do you think this is ethical? There is no right answer.

AI Biases

Imagine asking an AI like ChatGPT about any historical event or political opinion, do you think it would answer you objectively? Probably not, sometimes. This is because the AI is fed with huge amounts of information that has previously been written by real people.

The question then is whether we can blindly trust the supposedly faithful and infallible opinion of an AI when it is riddled with so many biases and dissenting views. By extension, an ethical issue for AI is whether programmers can find a way to avoid discriminatory statements and purely ideological on the part of the language models.

AI and copyright

The content that AI generates is anonymous and unrepeatable, one could argue. Yet the amount of data an AI handles is oceanic in scale, does not mean that their sources of information are anonymous., far from it. In fact, if companies start implementing AI for their content tasks, their content may end up looking mediocre or even reduplicated.

And it is not only written content that is subject to this ethical dilemma for AI, but also the graphical content it produces from prompts. Stable Diffusion and Midjourney (AI pictorial content generation software) render images because their databases hold a sea of examples they have been trained on.

Therefore, AI may indeed be taking advantage of the copyrighted content by authors who have never consented to the use of the content. So is the content of artificial intelligence original, or a rehash of works whose commercial use should be restricted for the sake of copyright?

Harnessing AI for illicit purposes

Artificial intelligence is getting better and better at imitating human beings. In many cases, if we are caught unawares, we might mistakenly think that a human like us is behind an artificially intelligent chat.

AI has not only come to revolutionise the labour market and people's comfort, but criminals of all kinds are also able to take advantage of these new technologies in a mischievous way.

AI-based video generation is worth noting, as this is a software that raises many questions about its morality. With this technology we can create fake videos and fake news This can serve as a method of harassment and/or defamation in many cases.