Artificial Intelligence in Software Development: Discussing the Ethics

OpenAI truly revolutionized the field of AI in March 2022 by releasing its AI chat model GBT3. Although developments in the field of AI have been underway for a long time, humanity is truly on the verge of AI being able to replace humans in many areas such as design, automation, software development, and even in the areas of decision making. However, such advanced AI comes with ethical problems that need to be solved.

In this essay, I propose to consider the ethical problems of using AI in software development, proposing solutions to potential risks.

Ethical implications need to be considered when developing software to ensure fairness, transparency, and accountability in the deployment of AI-driven systems, even though AI offers many benefits to AI development.

The first is data security and privacy. According to research (Boulemtafes, Derhab, & Challal, 2020), privacy concerns are particularly related to sensitive input data either during training or inference and to the sharing of the trained model with others. Typically, models used for AI are trained on huge amounts of data.

According to research (Arnott, 2023), ChatGPT collects both your account-level information as well as your conversation history. This includes records such as your email address, device, IP address, and location, as well as any public or private information you use in your ChatGPT prompts. This cannot but cause concern since this data may be confidential.

Therefore, developers of AI systems must obtain consent to process personal data. Typically, when it comes to processing personal data, protection from unauthorized access is necessary, so it is necessary to implement a strong encryption method.

The second is bias and fairness. As mentioned earlier, large amounts of data are used to train AI. But are there any guarantees that AI will not inherit the bias of their information sources? This can lead to highly unpredictable consequences, unfair outcomes, discrimination, and the perpetuation of social inequality.

For example, a person turning to an AI language model expects to receive pure information that does not convey anyone’s opinion but receives biased and reversed information. The dataset leans towards specific demographics, and the algorithm might exhibit biases, leading to unfair outcomes. Therefore, according to research (Li, 2023) collecting widely varied data representing different races, genders, ages,  cultures, and social backgrounds is key to ensuring algorithmic fairness.

The danger lies in the fact that this can control the opinion of all humanity about certain facts. It is diversity in data presentation and regular bias checks to identify and mitigate discriminatory patterns. Therefore, continuous commitment and effort are vital to ensuring algorithmic fairness.

According to Li (2023), only through continuous learning, improvement, and adaptation can the field of  AI  achieve genuine fairness and equity. Data scientists, on the other hand, are responsible for analyzing data, ensuring the algorithm’s performance is fair across various demographics.

Third is accountability and transparency. These days, AI algorithms have a complex structure, which makes it quite difficult to determine the degree of responsibility for errors in them. Issues surrounding transparency, debates on job displacement, and global disparities in AI  development exacerbate these ethical dilemmas. According to Li (2023) to solve this problem, it is necessary to introduce clear standards and, of course, reporting.

This same demand will differentiate the roles of developers, data scientists, decision-makers, and end users. Also, the process of documenting key processes can enable tracking and reporting of AI results. The concept of transparency refers to the degree to which the decisions and actions of AI systems are understandable, interpretable, and understandable not only by the specialists who developed the AI model, but also by all interested parties.

An example of the use of interpretable machine learning models could be decision trees or even linear models. This will allow us to evaluate the factors influencing AI forecasts and decisions. Association for Computing Machinery outlined seven principles that emphasize the importance of ethical considerations in the design, implementation, and use of analytic computer systems.

These principles are provided and explained in greater detail in the article by Garfinkel et al (2017). According to Matthews (2020), these principles encompass various facets of ethical considerations in the design, implementation, and use of analytic systems. Access and Redress should encourage the adoption of mechanisms that enable questioning and redress for individuals and groups that are adversely affected by algorithmically informed decisions.

Accountability entails that institutions should be held responsible for decisions made by the algorithms that they use, even if it is not feasible to explain in detail how the algorithms produce their results. Explanations of systems and institutions that use algorithmic decision-making are encouraged to produce explanations regarding both the procedures followed by the algorithm and the specific decisions that are made.

Data Provenance means a description of the way in which the training data collected should be maintained by the builders of the algorithms, accompanied by an exploration of the potential biases induced by the human or algorithmic data-gathering process. Audibility of models, algorithms, data, and decisions should be recorded so that they can be audited in cases where harm is suspected.

Validation and Testing of institutions should use rigorous methods to validate their models and document those methods and results. In particular, they should routinely perform tests to assess and determine whether the model generates discriminatory harm.

In conclusion, developments in the field of AI have been underway for a long time, humanity is truly on the verge of AI being able to replace humans in many areas such as design, automation, software development, and even in the areas of decision making.

However, such advanced AI comes with ethical problems that need to be solved. In this essay, I considered the ethical problems of using AI in software development, proposing solutions to potential risks.

References

Arnott, B. (2023, September 13). Yes, ChatGPT Saves Your Data. Here’s How to Keep It Secure. Retrieved May 11, 2024, from Forcepoint website: https://www.forcepoint.com/blog/insights/does-chatgpt-save-data#:~:text=ChatGPT%20collects%20both%20your%20account Boulemtafes, A., Derhab, A., & Challal, Y. (2020). A review of privacy-preserving techniques for deep learning. Neurocomputing,
384, 2–5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2019.11.041

Garfinkel, S.; Matthews, J.; Shapiro, S.; and Smith, J. 2017. Toward Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability. Communications of the ACM 60(9): 5. doi.org/10.1145/ 3125780.

Li, N. (2023). Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence: A Comprehensive Discussion from the Perspective of Computer Vision. SHS Web of Conferences,
179. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/202317904024 Matthews, J. (2020). Patterns and Antipatterns, Principles, and Pitfalls: Accountability and Transparency in Artificial Intelligence. AI Magazine, 41(1), 82–89.
https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v41i1.5204