Research and Practice of AI Ethics: A case study approach juxtaposing academic discourse with organisational reality

Abstract

This study investigates the ethical use of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies (BD+AI) - using an empirical approach. The paper categorises the current literature and presents a multi-case study of 'on-the-ground' ethical issues that uses qualitative tools to analyse findings from ten targeted case-studies from a range of domains. The analysis coalesces identified singular ethical issues, (from the literature), into clusters to offer a comparison with the proposed classification in the literature. The results show that despite the variety of different social domains, fields, and applications of AI , there is overlap and correlation between the organisations’ ethical concerns. This more detailed understanding of ethics in AI+BD is required to ensure that the multitude of suggested ways of addressing them can be targeted and succeed in mitigating the pertinent ethical issues that are often discussed in the literature.