---
id: "aiethics:lecture/ethics-in-ai"
type: "AI Ethics course lecture"
title: "Ethics in AI: A Challenging Task"
url: "https://aiethicscourse.org/lectures/ethics-in-ai"
authors: ["Ricardo Baeza-Yates"]
summary: "This module highlights five challenges from real world examples of AI in action: discrimination, phrenology, unfair digital commerce, stupid models, and the indiscriminate use of computing resources."
source: "AI Ethics: Global Perspectives (aiethicscourse.org)"
licence: "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)"
---

# Ethics in AI: A Challenging Task

A lecture of the course [AI Ethics: Global Perspectives](https://aiethicscourse.org/).

## Lecturer

- Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Research Professor, The Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University (Silicon Valley Campus)

## About this lecture

In the first part of this module, we cover five current specific challenges through examples: (1) discrimination (e.g., facial recognition, justice, sharing economy, language models); (2) phrenology (e.g., biometric based predictions); (3) unfair digital commerce (e.g., exposure and popularity bias); (4) stupid models (e.g., minimal adversarial AI) and (5) indiscriminate use of computing resources (e.g., large language models). These examples do have a personal bias but set the context for the second part of the module where we address four generic challenges: (1) too many principles (e.g., principles vs. techniques), (2) cultural differences (e.g., Christian vs. Muslim); (3) regulation (e.g., privacy, antitrust) and (4) our cognitive biases. We finish with a discussion on what we can do to address these challenges in the near future.

## Video and transcript

- Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQcf6TaE6Gg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQcf6TaE6Gg)
- Transcript (PDF): [https://aiethicscourse.org/img/072b1481-fa14-489b-8265-89a0b0481436.pdf](https://aiethicscourse.org/img/072b1481-fa14-489b-8265-89a0b0481436.pdf)

## Read, watch, and listen

- [Towards intellectual freedom in an AI Ethics Global Community](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-021-00052-5), Ebell, C., Baeza-Yates, R., Benjamins, R. et al. Towards intellectual freedom in an AI Ethics Global Community. AI and Ethics 1, 131–138 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-021-00052-5.
- [ACM Panel Discussion - From Coded Bias to Algorithmic Fairness: How do we get there](https://youtu.be/ji0gMjKFfmI)
- [The Web Conference panel on Ethics & Fairness on the Web](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkH3T7guZ6Y)
- [RecSys 2020 Keynote: Bias on Search and Recommender Systems](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zetbdx4_08)
- [Bias on the Web](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/6/228035-bias-on-the-web/fulltext), Baeza-Yates, R. Bias on the Web. Communications of the ACM 61, No. 6, 54-61 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3209581.
- [Webinar (AI Lead Talk): La ética de la IA: un gran desafío](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYroFhlJlmQ)