The complex issue of AI and ethics

“We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay.” This is not the kind of blog post Microsoft Corp. had in mind when it launched its artificial intelligence chatbot called Tay in March. Consider another case of Eugenia Kuyda, the co-founder and chief operating officer of a Russian AI startup called Luka Inc., who has developed an AI chatbot that lets anyone talk to her dearly departed best friend Roman Mazurenko, a fellow tech entrepreneur who died in a car accident in November 2015, according to a 7 October report by the International Business Times. All these AI apps, and numerous others, have one thing in common—they rely on deep-learning algorithms that learn from huge unstructured data sets with the help of artificial neural networks. The question, though, is how do these artificial neural networks—loosely modelled on the human brain—make decisions when discerning patterns and making predictions? However, unlike the human brain, the artificial neural networks or simulated brains can be basically programmed as we desire—which also introduces subjectivity when it relies on supervised learning.