INTHEBLACK September 2024 special edition - Flipbook - Page 36
ETHICAL AI
TEDx, Eleanor Manley: Why AI can’t be ethical – yet
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THE NEED FOR ACCOUNTABILITY
Technology should never be unrestrained, but who
is ultimately accountable for generative AI tools?
Longstaff says it is a question yet to be resolved.
“We have to work out, for example, whether or
not the person who initiates the system and designs
it has adequately discharged their responsibilities in
terms of building the ethics into the design itself
and putting in certain protections and restraints
that we want.”
Technologies like generative AI should always be
bound, to a degree, by ethical consideration, he says.
“You’ve got to start at the very beginning and
say, ‘What is enabled by this technology?’ How
am I going to restrain it, so that there are only
things which are intended and, hopefully, for
the good? How do you minimise the use of it for
other purposes?
“There can also be another level of accountability,
in terms of the person who deploys it,” Longstaff
adds. “To what extent have they put in place
measures to ensure that it is only used for the proper
purposes for which it was designed?”
36 INTHEBLACK September 2024 SPECIAL EDITION
PROFESSIONAL SCEPTICISM
AND GOVERNANCE
The fundamental principles of ethics for the
profession are set out in APES 110 Code of Ethics
for Professional Accountants. It requires accountants
to be independent of mind to ensure they act with
integrity and exercise objectivity and professional
scepticism.
“If someone who’s performing an audit has ethical
concerns around the information that AI is giving
them, whether that is around bias or accuracy or
whatever it may be, they have a responsibility to
raise their concerns,” De Alwis says.
Longstaff adds that the results produced by
generative AI tools should also be “able to be tested
against analogue judgement in the real world”.
“This is not different to what accountants have always
done, particularly in the auditing profession,” he says.
“Companies are constantly producing accounts,
which they claim to be a true and fair representation
of the state of the company’s financial affairs, only for
it to be discovered through the independent review
of auditors that perhaps it’s not true.
