Media Mentions

Pelissero, Ethics Center director of government ethics, said that Anaheim and its elected officials still had the responsibility to consider both the positive and negative economic impacts of DisneylandForward.

“There has to be a level of independent analysis done by the city when it is considering a major set of policies that will largely benefit one corporate landowner,” Pelissero said. “As a public official you can’t simply accept the arguments that are being presented to you by Disney and its hired consultant about this without being able to do your own due diligence on the project.”

John Pelissero, director, government ethics, quoted by The Los Angeles Times.

“Lina Khan is a creative leader, leaning on the foundation of the FTC, the act that established it, to draw attention to marketplace failures in an emerging area, the governance of AI,” Skeet told PYMNTS. “She is continuing with themes introduced in her breakthrough academic paper about Amazon to encourage consumers and regulators to view corporate behavior through new lenses.”

Ann Skeet, senior director, leadership ethics, quoted by PYMNTS.

NBC's Scott Budman reports the Mountain View City Council has voted to put up 24 license plate readers around the city capturing still images of cars in the area.

"This is definitely a privacy violation in that it records all of us whether we’re guilty of anything or just driving around going about our business." said Irina Raicu, the director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

Irina Raicu, director, internet ethics, quoted by KNTV NBC Bay Area.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently apologized for the use of Scarlett Johansson's voice for ChatGPT. His actions exemplify the "move fast and break things" mentality of many Silicon Valley CEOs.

"The one thing that we've learned in the Valley with tech companies is that the first mover who builds the maximum user base of people adopting a certain technology is going to command the market," Subramaniam Vincent, director of journalism and media at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, told Axios.

Subramaniam Vincent, director, media and journalism ethics, quoted by Axios.

Tech Target writes about Ethics in the Age of AI, which outlines how Americans feel about artificial intelligence (AI) from an ethical standpoint. The Markkula Center and its Institute for Technology, Ethics, and Culture (ITEC) surveyed 3,000 Americans aged 18+ and found that they have concerns about the technology’s impact on the human race.

More than half of Americans polled believe AI companies aren't considering ethics when developing the technology, and nearly 90% favor government regulations.

That credibility gap can affect investors and sales to the many enterprises evaluating and buying AI technology, said Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at the Ethics Center.

"Reputational harm can translate into a loss of shareholder value," Skeet said. "A significant misstep might cost them in terms of their reputation in the marketplace."

"It shows that the public and regulators are tired of counting on these internal governance efforts to keep us all safe," said Irina Raicu, director of internet ethics at the Ethics Center. "The public feels that those kinds of efforts are just not sufficient, so there needs to be some laws."

"For those companies to build trust with consumers, they're going to need to demonstrate a pretty deep commitment to developing trustworthy technology," Skeet said.

Irina Raicu, director, internet ethics and Ann Skeet, senior director, leadership ethics, quoted by Tech Target.

While you don’t want to get too far into the weeds, you can ask for the sources of data that the system is being trained on, says Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and coauthor of Ethics in the Age of Disruptive Technologies: An Operational Roadmap. “[Directors] can also advise proactively choosing an AI system that has an identifiable training data set.”

Ann Skeet, senior director, leadership ethics, quoted by Corporate Board Member Magazine.

There are many key steps to ensuring the ethical application of AI in marketing. One of these steps involves developing and implementing ethical AI guidelines to protect consumers. 

"[B]eing unethical is a great way to lose consumer trust and ruin your business. At the more practical level, issues like safety, security, reliability, privacy, trustworthy data use, being unbiased, fair, inclusive, transparent, and accountable—these are the principles that you will find in various corporate AI ethics principles, and they are a good start," said Green.

Green spoke on the importance of upholding specific values in each field that utilizes AI. “These key values should shape the construction from AI systems from the ground up. In healthcare, AI needs to focus on patient health; in finance protecting the honest flow of money; in marketing, the honest sharing of ideas, including honestly sharing products.” 

Brian Green, director, technology ethics, quoted by CMSWire.

With the increasing capabilities of AI models in collecting and analyzing data, there needs to be safeguards against biases. Google plans to patent and use a "clustering model" that works to group data and then balance types of data, with the hopes of creating a model that mitigates bias.

“Every model is going to be limited by its dataset, and every dataset is going to be limited by its sampling,” said Green. 

Creating unbiased datasets can also create overcorrections that lead to inaccuracies, Green noted.

“Ultimately, it’s a really complex problem, and it’s going to require a really complex solution.”

Brian Green, director, technology ethics, quoted by The Daily Upside.

"People crave authenticity," says Subramaniam Vincent, director of journalism and media at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. He told Axios, "There's a "creeping fear" that the images and media we see every day are not real." 

Subramaniam Vincent, director, media and journalism ethics, quoted by Axios.

Astra Taylor calls human labor hidden under the veneer of a robot or AI tool, "fauxtomation."

"This phenomenon is nicknamed “fauxtomation” because it “hides the human work and also falsely inflates the value of the ‘automated’ solution,” says Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics program.

“This is not just a question of marketing appeal,” Raicu says. “It’s also a reflection of the current push to bring things to market before they actually work as intended or advertised. Some companies seem to view the ‘humans inside the machine’ as an interim step while the automation solution improves.”

Irina Raicu, director, internet ethics, quoted by Scientific American.