Serve AI Ethics: The Big Picture
An overview of the values, tensions, and questions at the heart of ethical AI.
What is Serve AI Ethics?
Serve AI Ethics is the study and practice of ensuring that artificial intelligence systems are designed, used, and governed in ways that are aligned with human values, rights, and collective well-being.
Why It Matters
- AI affects major life decisions (jobs, loans, justice, health).
- Bias, surveillance, and exploitation can be baked into systems unnoticed.
- Ethics builds trust, inclusion, accountability, and long-term safety.
Big Questions in Serve AI Ethics
- Who decides what "fairness" means in an algorithm?
- Can a machine be held accountable?
- Should AI ever be used in policing, war, or welfare decisions?
- How do we make AI transparent to non-experts?
- Whose data is being used — and was there consent?
- What are the climate costs of scaling AI?
Common Ethical Frameworks
- Beneficence: Maximize benefit, reduce harm
- Non-maleficence: Do no harm — especially to vulnerable groups
- Justice: Ensure fairness and equity
- Autonomy: Respect human freedom, limit machine control
- Explicability: Make decisions explainable and accountable
Real Examples of Ethical Dilemmas
- Facial recognition used in surveillance and false arrests
- Art scraped into generative AI without permission
- Chatbots giving harmful or manipulative advice
- AI models emitting tons of COâ‚‚ during training
Intersectionality in AI
Serve AI Ethics must center race, gender, class, disability, and geography to avoid replicating real-world inequality. The more diverse the team, the less risk of harm.