The new charge of “ethics washing”

Khari Johnson for VentureBeat:

One of the essential phrases necessary to understand AI in 2019 has to be “ethics washing.” Put simply, ethics washing — also called “ethics theater” — is the practice of fabricating or exaggerating a company’s interest in equitable AI systems that work for everyone. A textbook example for tech giants is when a company promotes “AI for good” initiatives with one hand while selling surveillance capitalism tech to governments and corporate customers with the other.

How AI companies can avoid ethics washing

I don’t think it’s fair to criticize companies for false effort in AI ethics quite yet. There are no generally accepted standards.