# AI Ethics The broader moral framework governing AI development and deployment. Distinct from [[AI Safety]] (preventing harm) and [[AI Alignment]] (matching values), AI Ethics encompasses the full spectrum of moral considerations. Core dimensions: - **Fairness**: Does the AI treat all users equally? Are outcomes equitable across demographics, or does the system encode and amplify existing biases? - **Transparency**: Can users understand why an AI made a specific decision? Explainability is not optional; it is a prerequisite for trust. - **Accountability**: Who is responsible when AI causes harm? The developer, the deployer, the operator, or the user? Clear chains of responsibility must exist before deployment. - **Consent**: Did users agree to how their data is collected, processed, and used? Informed consent requires genuine understanding, not buried terms of service. - **Societal impact**: What are the second-order effects? Job displacement, power concentration, surveillance normalization, erosion of human agency. Every organization deploying AI needs an ethics framework, not just a safety checklist. Safety prevents catastrophic outcomes. Ethics ensures the non-catastrophic outcomes are still acceptable. A system can be safe (it does not crash, does not leak data) and still be unethical (it discriminates, it manipulates, it erodes autonomy). Connected to but broader than [[Responsible AI]], which operationalizes ethical principles into practices and policies. Ethics asks "should we?"; responsible AI asks "how do we do it right?". The [[EU AI Act]] represents the first major regulatory attempt to codify AI ethics into law. [[AI Governance]] provides the organizational structures to enforce ethical standards. [[AI Bias]] is one of the most visible ethical failures. [[AI Usage Policy]] translates ethics into concrete organizational rules. [[Human-in-the-Loop]] design is a practical safeguard, but it is not sufficient on its own. A human approving biased outputs does not make those outputs ethical. ## References ## Related - [[AI Safety]] - [[AI Alignment]] - [[Responsible AI]] - [[AI Bias]] - [[AI Governance]] - [[AI Usage Policy]] - [[EU AI Act]] - [[Human-in-the-Loop]]