The Different Faces of AI Ethics Across the World: A Principle-to-Practice Gap Analysis

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming our daily life with many applications in healthcare, space exploration, banking, and finance. This rapid progress in AI has brought increasing attention to the potential impacts of AI technologies on society, with ethically questionable consequences. In recent years, several ethical principles have been released by governments, national organizations, and international organizations. These principles outline high-level precepts to guide the ethical development, deployment, and governance of AI. However, the abstract nature, diversity, and context-dependence of these principles make them difficult to implement and operationalize, resulting in gaps between principles and their execution. Most recent work analyzed and summarized existing AI principles and guidelines but did not provide findings on principle-to-practice gaps nor how to mitigate them. These findings are particularly important to ensure that AI practical guidances are aligned with ethical principles and values. In this article, we provide a contextual and global evaluation of current ethical AI principles for all continents, with the aim to identify potential principle characteristics tailored to specific countries or applicable across countries. Next, we analyze the current level of AI readiness and current practical guidances of ethical AI principles in different countries, to identify gaps in the practical guidance of AI principles and their causes. Finally, we propose recommendations to mitigate the principle-to-practice gaps.