Sanjay Pradhan, president, World Forum for Ethics in Business, discussed ‘ethics in AI’ at an event hosted by the India chapter of the International Advertising Association, and AI Association of India.

Pradhan raised concerns and focused on the key risks the advertising and media industry should focus on during his talk.

Outside of the industry, he also spoke about the danger of AI to the world overall.

“The pioneers of AI, who have built it, have warned us of risks beyond human control. They include AI-enabled weapons. Imagine a third actor in wars. Artificial general intelligence can think and act like human beings but with motives that can end up causing harm,” he stated.

AI as a tech and ethical revolution

Among the concerns he had with AI was the handing over of data to tech giants.

“We are handing our data to a select few tech giants, and that’s concerning. AI stands as humanity’s greatest ethical test,” he stated before listing how one can shape AI using ethics.

“Companies that used ethics in business outperformed others by 25%,” he said.

Listing the challenges in how AI is being used, he added, “The explosion of deepfakes is an issue. Disinformation, bias and discrimination all come from there. AI will make fake news much worse. By 2030, 70% of online content will be AI-generated fake content.”

He urged companies to counter this by creating watermarks for AI-generated content. While some are using them, many aren’t, and he stated that if that could be scaled up, then AI can be turned into a tool for the truth.

Another challenge he noted was bias and discrimination, and pointed to an incident from 2021 in the Netherlands.

“In the Netherlands, an algorithm wrongly flagged 26,000 families for welfare fraud. Most of the targets were immigrants, and the scale was huge. We want independent, non-biased audits,” he stated.

Coming back to the point on data privacy, he gave reference to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which used data from 87 million users on Facebook to manipulate elections results.

Giving Apple’s example of committing to privacy as a human right, he stated how more brands should do so, as it helps earn the consumer’s trust.

Jobs

One of the biggest impact of AI is around jobs and spoke about how it could end up creating more of a gender bias at the workforce.

Giving his point-of-view on the same, he said, “AI could disrupt 300 million jobs worldwide. And this could impact women in the workforce harder.”

He urged companies to run workforce impact disclosures related to AI and train the staff to use it.

He cited AT&T’s example of investing a billion USD to reskill its employees through its ‘Future Ready’ initiative.

He listed three broad approaches to get companies to embed AI ethics in their workforce – regulation, advocacy and value.

“We need Government setting limits on risk. The EU has a law on AI. It requires powerful systems for safety and transparency. We also need to protect digital rights and expose opaque algorithms. And we are seeing nearly two-thirds of consumers valuing brands that are ethical, which makes ethical certifications more precious,” stated Pradhan.

He signed off by speaking about how Anthropic raised brand trust by declining a US government deal despite threats from the Donald Trump administration.

“While OpenAI stepped in and took that contract, Anthropic saw a surge post that denial and climbed to the top of the app chart because consumers saw that ethical stance. It proved that ethical leadership doesn’t mean commercial disadvantage,” he concluded.