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Are researchers being pushed towards the unethical use of artificial intelligence? Can they change that?
To start with, a caveat. Any attendees hoping for practical guidance on how to address ethical issues in project grants involving artificial intelligence would have been disappointed by the Ethics and Integrity for AI in Research webinar organised by the EU’s Scientific Advice Mechanism earlier this month. And any readers of this review hoping likewise will feel the same.
But if it was a deep dive into a hot, much-sensationalised topic that attendees were after, they probably left satisfied—although maybe not feeling very optimistic. For while there was none of the doomsaying polemic that often accompanies discussions of AI, there were frequent evocations of the societal and systemic factors that may have made the use of AI technology in research inherently ethically problematic. The central questions the webinar posed were: can researchers stop AI being so problematic? And if so, how? The answers were tentative.
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