AI in the headlines: the portrayal of the ethical issues of artificial intelligence in the media
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AI in the headlines: the portrayal of the ethical issues of artificial intelligence in the media Leila Ouchchy1 · Allen Coin1 · Veljko Dubljević1 Received: 12 December 2018 / Accepted: 13 March 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies become increasingly prominent in our daily lives, media coverage of the ethical considerations of these technologies has followed suit. Since previous research has shown that media coverage can drive public discourse about novel technologies, studying how the ethical issues of AI are portrayed in the media may lead to greater insight into the potential ramifications of this public discourse, particularly with regard to development and regulation of AI. This paper expands upon previous research by systematically analyzing and categorizing the media portrayal of the ethical issues of AI to better understand how media coverage of these issues may shape public debate about AI. Our results suggest that the media has a fairly realistic and practical focus in its coverage of the ethics of AI, but that the coverage is still shallow. A multifaceted approach to handling the social, ethical and policy issues of AI technology is needed, including increasing the accessibility of correct information to the public in the form of fact sheets and ethical value statements on trusted webpages (e.g., government agencies), collaboration and inclusion of ethics and AI experts in both research and public debate, and consistent government policies or regulatory frameworks for AI technology. Keywords Artificial intelligence (AI) · Ethics · Media · News · Public discourse · Public policy
1 Introduction The practical applications and prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) in our daily lives has grown significantly in recent years (Standing Committee of the One Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence 2016). With this increase in prevalence and applicability of AI has come a wide range of ethical debates, including how AI can be programmed to make moral decisions, how these decision-making processes can be made sufficiently transparent to humans, and who should be held accountable for these decisions. A crucial objective in the development of ethical AI is cultivating public trust and acceptance of AI technologies. * Veljko Dubljević [email protected] Leila Ouchchy [email protected] Allen Coin [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University, 101 Lampe Drive, Raleigh, NC, USA
In the academic literature, concerns have been voiced about the business drivers for monetizing AI (see Baldini et al. 2018; Bauer and Dubljević 2019), especially since the most successful strategies for AI development (bottom-up approaches and, to a certain extent, hybrid approaches) and monetization create a lack of transparency. Additionally, the media has a large impact on the way issues are framed to the public in every field (Racine et al. 2005; Royal Society 2018; Chuan et al. 2019), so public opinion and ac
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