The Ethics of AI for Information Professionals: Eight Scenarios

ABSTRACT

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is central to transformative changes happening in many industries, perhaps potentially to a fourth industrial revolution, but it has also raised a storm of ethical concerns. Information professionals need to navigate these ethical issues effectively because they are likely to use AI in delivering services as well as contributing to the process of adoption of AI more widely in their organisations. Professional ethical codes are too high level to offer precise or complete guidance. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to review the relevant literature and describe eight ethics scenarios of AI which have been developed specifically for information professionals to understand the issues in a concrete form. The paper considers how AI might be defined and presents some of the applications relevant to the information profession. It then summarises the key ethical issues raised by AI in general both those inherent to the technology and those arising from the nature of the AI industry. It considers existing studies that have discussed aspects of the ethical issues specifically for information professionals. It then describes a set of eight ethics scenarios that have been developed and shared in an open form to promote their reuse.

KEYWORDS:

• The information profession
• ethics
• artificial intelligence
• data
• social justice
• responsible AI

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Cox

Dr Andrew Cox is a senior lecturer at the Information School, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. His main research area has been around the response of the information professions to contemporary societal challenges such as new technologies, increasing managerialism, datafication, changing conceptualisations of learning and a perceived social crisis around well-being.