-
Use “Al ethics” has been increasingly identified as a means of support for tech companies’
deregulation and self-regulatory efforts, which are meant to combat new legislative measures
introduced by governments. Among others, Metcalf, Moss, and Bloyd [
1
] and James and Whelan [
2
]
argue that ethical artificial intelligence (Al) has been normalized as a new asset in the tech industry,
which has turned recent scandals encountered in this field (e.g., Cambridge Analytics) into “ethical
issues.” Wagner [
3
] summarized this view in the claim that “ethics is the new industry
selfregulation.” For instance, Facebook [
4
] announced that it has organized its responsible Al efforts
around five key pillars: privacy and security, fairness and inclusion, robustness and safety,
transparency and control, and accountability and governance. Google, in turn, published ethical
principles that emphasize the need for Al applications to be socially beneficial, avoid creating or
reinforcing bias, and be safe and accountable [
5
]. Similarly, Microsoft [
6
] has codified company
procedures to develop safe and trustworthy AL Scholars have viewed Big Tech’s version of Al ethics
mainly as a performative gesture and a form of reputation-polishing that evince no desire to make
any fundamental changes at the corporate level [
7
].
Scholars have used the terms “ethics shopping,” “ethics theatre,” and
“ethics washing” to describe how instrumentalizing ethics creates misleading communications about,
and impressions of, ethical Al [
8, 9
], Big Tech’s instrumentalization of ethics as a rhetorical weapon
is thought to have serious consequences for academic ethics research [
10, 7
]. Phan and colleagues [
7
]
argue that Big Tech has transformed Al ethics into a form of capital—a transactional object external
to the organization—and thus one of the many “things” that contemporary capitalists must tame and
procure. Interestingly, this capital is primarily produced by Al ethics researchers at universities and
other research centers, and it is then accumulated or consumed by Big Tech. To recycle, accumulate,
or consume Al ethics, technology companies sponsor and organize, for example, gatherings such as
the annual ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. In 2023, in exchange for
a $75,000 sponsorship, a company could secure a verbal acknowledgment of their contribution in the
opening and closing remarks of the conference and their logo displayed in the conference venue.
This paper examines Big Tech’s efforts to harness Al ethics for its own rhetorical use and how
scholars, journalists, and activists have responded to this pursuit to capitalize ethics. Drawing on
political theory [
11
], we call this process the politicization of Al ethics. Following Palonen’s [
12
]
formulation, politicization means identifying relevant power structures and making visible the
political potential of disruptive discourses and activities. The politicization of Al ethics thus refers to
the act of labeling something as political—in this case, disclosing the methods and power mechanisms
behind how Big Tech harnesses ethics for its own goals and interests.
Academic ethics research is often thought to be a neutral and context-independent methodology
that is clearly divided from self-interested corporate rhetoric. This boundary has become increasingly
blurred in the debate over Al ethics, as all the actors use the same terminology and conceptualizations.
This paper examines the combined power of capitalism and technology and its societal implications.
Contrary to some philosophers’ claims [
13
], I suggest that academic tech ethics can and should
address questions of power in close collaboration with other academic disciplines, such as science
and technology studies (STS) and feminist studies, to make sense of the problematic appropriation of
ethics by the tech sector.
2. Al Ethics Harnessed by Big Tech
For decades, philosophers have described how technology embeds politics and shapes social outcomes
[
14
], However, the fast rise and great potential of Al have renewed the urgency of considering the
complex political nature of the Al industry. This paper argues for a fine-grained conception of the
political that can capture the novel forms of politicization observed in this industry. The efforts of
Big Tech to promote trustworthy Al indicate a highly calculated stance in which their methods seem
designed more to avoid reputational risks than to acknowledge the political nature of Al and its
implications [
1,2
]. While the intentions behind these initiatives may sometimes be considered good
or innocent, Big Tech’s practices demonstrate how it uses its power and vast profits to lobby for
legislation at the national and international levels.
There is a long history of corporations funding scientific research in a way that strategically
advances their business agendas and polishes their reputations [
15
], This tactic is perhaps most
famously associated with Big Tobacco and Big Pharma, but it is now increasingly used to describe the
actions of Big Tech [
16
], Google has funded research on the ethics of technology since 2005 [17], In
the 2010s, Oxford University alone received at least £17 million from Google. While most of this grant
money was spent on technical research, Alphabet has also funded work on Al ethics at the Oxford
Internet Institute. In 2019, Facebook donated $7.5 million to the Technical University of Munich so
that this university could set up a new Al ethics research center [18], Meanwhile, the US National
Science Foundation announced that it is partnering with Amazon, with each group committing up to
$10 million in research grants over the next three years to work on fairness in Al [19].
Phan et al. [
7
] argue that the tech industry has become a primary buyer of ethical research output
in the “virtue economy,” which is supplied by allied university labs. This virtue capital relies upon
the autonomy of high-ranked academic scholars and is then translated back into economic capital
through funding, joint conferences, the invitation of in-house ethics professionals, etc. Scholars
recruited as suppliers of virtue can be easily dismissed if their statements betray any resistance to
existing corporate business models [20], So-called “in-house moral philosophers,” or ethics
committees in tech companies, have little power to shape the internal policies of the companies [21],
In this way, Big Tech has attempted to manage the work of ethicians by aligning public universities
and commercial interests in ways that situate scholars at the center of the economy of virtue while
maintaining control over funding, output, and key corporate decisions. This is an effort to promote
the reputation of tech companies as generous saviors while simultaneously trying to tackle the legal
challenges, such as tax systems, that arise when governments themselves try to harness the power of
Big Tech. Thus, the discourse of ethical Al has been strategically aligned with Big Tech’s efforts to
avoid legally enforceable restrictions on its controversial technologies [20].
Politicization generally implies a demand or action that identifies an issue as political—thus
making previously apolitical, objective, or “neutral” matters political [
11
]. The politicization of Al
ethics can be identified in multiple maneuvers through which Big Tech claims to establish and follow
ethical rules by highlighting them rather than other relevant issues, such as their business models.
As Palonen et al. [
11
] put it, a typical and particularly intensive way of doing politics is to declare
that one’s own activity is “unpolitical,” that is, ethical, scientific, or impartial. As Bietti [
10
] points
out, talking about Al ethics instead of Al politics can be seen as a sign that the field’s methods are
being depoliticized and normalized to influence different actors in society. Many methods used by
tech giants are indirect and covert in such a way that the companies cannot be accused of corruption
or illegal procedures. These “soft” forms of influence include providing research funding for Al ethics
research and cooperating with universities.
As governments slash public funding for universities all over the world while, accordingly,
universities push their research staff to attract industry money, the dilemmas and paradoxes that
researchers encounter become more acute [
7
]. Instead of corrupting individual academic scholars
through direct research funding, tech companies provide funding to universities that employ
scientifically high-ranked scholars in Al ethics posts. For researchers, this arrangement appears
preferable to, or more ethically defensible than, accepting research funding directly from Big Tech.
YochaiBenkler [18] argues that universities abdicate their critical role when they accept funding from
the tech industry to study the moral, political, and legal implications of practices that are core to the
business model of this sector.
Big Tech’s virtue economy demonstrates the peculiar positionality of scholars working at the
intersection of these complex circulations of money and the products of Al ethics. As suppliers of
ethical capital, academic researchers in universities must adjust to their new position as producers of
Al ethics in this new economy of virtue. Phan and her colleagues summarize this shift:
Participating in the economy of virtue from this position makes a great deal of
sense. It enables researchers to independently pursue critiques of technology
companies while properly resourced, and simultaneously satisfies institutional
demands in ways that would otherwise not be possible, all while producing
reputational resources that are cashed out by Big Capital, but not Big Tech. [7:130]
One could say that, for researchers, this is a win-win situation: talented researchers benefit
financially from the support provided by the tech industry but can still maintain their autonomous
position in relation to companies and criticize the latter’s operations. Still, researchers in the field of
Al ethics are strongly divided when it comes to close collaboration with tech companies on Al ethics
research. Many doubt that corporate funding could ever put a researcher in an entirely independent
position.
In conclusion, while academic ethics is not accused of legitimizing the politicization of Al ethics,
it may suffer from significant methodological shortcomings and blind spots when analyzing
technology policy within capitalism. Diagnosing the political intentions of Al ethics is therefore
essential for restoring the credibility of academic ethics and supporting its mission to provide
remedies for the problems in society caused by datafication and algorithmic systems.
3. T h e P o l i t i c i z a t i o n of Al E t h i c s and C o u n t e r f o r c e s
The politicization of Al ethics discourses indicates a need to expand the academic scope of tech ethics
by acknowledging tech companies and their stakeholders as significant political agents [22]. Doing
so broadens the focus beyond “trustful Al” to the infrastructure and governance of sociotechnical
systems—not to mention the market fundamentalism of Big Tech—thus opening up new avenues for
examining the policies of the tech industry. On this view, many of the central problems related to big
data and complex algorithms are connected to broader issues of social and political (in)justice.
Therefore, it is essential to consider which new kinds of ethical conceptualizations and methodologies
are needed to study the entanglement of capitalism and technology, and thereby to provide a more
expansive approach to remediating the impacts of algorithmic systems on society.
Recently, several novel ethical approaches, such as “embedded Al ethics” [23], “the ethics of Al
ethics” [
9
], and “meta-framework Al ethics” [24], have been proposed to repair the shortcomings of
mainstream Al ethics. Critical Al ethics has turned to the field of critical theory to diagnose the power
structures and dynamisms that arise from Al’s relation to present-day capitalism [25]. In this context,
one of the key questions concerns what kinds of empirical resources, theorizations, and
conceptualizations—for instance, those offered by STS, political science, and political
philosophycan enable critical tech ethics to contribute to existing technology policy debates. In debates over the
impact of Al technologies on society, critical tech ethics must resist prejudicial beliefs that it is too
abstract and formal (the ivory tower dilemma) to inform concrete policy or too bound to empirical
research to make normative statements. Thus, critical tech ethics must strike a balance between being
able to use empirical research and social theories while maintaining its moral authority to produce
normative claims. Clearly, restructuring the values and practices of Al ethics around a political vision
of social justice will not be easy or happen immediately, but I suggest three steps that the discourse
of critical tech ethics can take to increase its importance in technology policy debates.
First, critical tech ethics can provide methodological approaches to identifying assumptions taken
for granted or blind spots that remain unrecognized in the mainstream discourse on Al ethics. The
main ethical principles in the discourse of Al ethics, such as fairness, privacy, reliability, transparency,
explainability, and accountability, can be acknowledged to reproduce, rather than transform, existing
social values in liberal welfare societies [
2
]. The relevant question is whether formal principles of
ethical Al are meaningful when these principles are distant from the complex solutions needed to
implement algorithmic systems in digital services or public administration. In fact, establishing such
principles is the minimum that can be expected of algorithmic governance, yet many Al scandals all
over the world show that AI-driven services can produce inequitable outcomes never before
witnessed.
Second, analyzing the ideologies at the foundation of the tech industry, such as technological
solutionism or technological optimism, allows us to broaden our perspective and view the statements
of agents in the tech industry through a wider lens, thereby overcoming confusions, correcting
inconsistencies, and drawing clarificatory distinctions. When ethical issues, such as biases, are
identified in AI-driven social benefit distribution systems, agents in the tech industry often respond
by proposing more accurate and complex technical solutions—rarely are solutions focused on
advancing social practices, such as equalizing tax systems and income distribution, or increasing the
production of cheap housing. Representatives of the tech industry often frame social issues, such as
equality, as challenges amenable to technological solutions [
1
], In many cases, the ideology of
technological solutionism promotes the belief that social issues arise from imperfect technical
solutions. Thus, the desire for technological solutions promotes an optimistic—yet ultimately
callous—search to optimize and mechanize systems believed to secure ethical neutrality.
Third, through the lens of critical tech ethics, we can shift from a narrow focus on fairness,
accountability, and transparency to an assessment of the kinds of problems Al poses in contemporary
society. The problem is not only whether Al-based services and products respect ethical principles,
but above all, how the profit-motivated actions of tech companies can undermine people’s well-being
and the realization of an equal society. Critical tech ethics should be understood as an explanatory
mode of inquiry that requires us to set out the reasons for advancing beneficial solutions that do not
involve new technologies. Thus far, the discourse around ethical Al has obscured the real problems
associated with the implementation of algorithmic systems in both the private and public sectors [
2
].
4. C o n c l u s i o n s
In this paper, I have discussed the symbiotic relationship between Big Tech and academic Al ethics
and how it can obscure the fundamental fact of political contestation undergirding the ethical issues
at stake. I have shown how the dominant discourses in Al ethics are unable to challenge the legitimacy
of algorithmic systems and instead often reinforce an understanding of Al as an imminent and
inescapable aspect of societal development. Recentering the values and practices of Al ethics around
political visions of social justice will not be easy or happen immediately, but I have proposed three
steps for reversing the course of critical Al ethics and increasing its relevance in technology policy
debates. I have argued that critical tech ethics should widen its scope and have the courage to promote
practices in which technology is not treated as the only solution to social and ecological problems.
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
I offer special thanks to the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions, which helped me
improve the quality of the manuscript. This paper is part of a research project (Democracy, Language
and the Politics of Algorithms Steering Vulnerable Citizens in Society, DIGltO) funded by Kone
Foundation.
Declaration on Generative Al
The author has not employed any Generative Al tools.