The Ethics of (Generative) AI

Abstract The clamor for AI-based applications involving generative models for text and images has fueled wild speculation about the risks and opportunities for society and humanity at large. The potential “existential” threat as a precursor to artificial general intelligence has provoked wide-ranging debates in the public, politics, and the corporate world involving technologists and ethicists from a range of academic disciplines. This thinkpiece proposes a metaperspective to reflect critically and constructively upon the current state of the field of AI ethics, arguing that scholars working in the domain of ethics should focalize conceptual, substantive, and procedural issues as integral elements of an ethical assessment of given technologies and their applications. It suggests that the ethics of generative AI is conceptually still underexplored and overly propagating technological fixes to problems of all kinds (technosolutionism). Procedurally, it needs to be clarified who can, who ought to, and who ultimately will be considered and heard as an expert on AI ethics, a question of relevance for the trust in, and reliance on, AI.