Ethical Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Literature Review

Artificial intelligence ethics is a field gaining vast functional importance in recent years. Most people assume that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could make employees redundant in future while others raise questions about ethical line of control while using AI technologies. Thus ensuring protection of data while adopting new technologies is critical and needs the prioritization of ethical standards for AI. Globalized bodies, particularly government agencies, private firms and academic institutions have made comprehensive efforts to address numerous ethical issues by writing AI ethical guidelines and holding active debates on AI ethics within and outside the AI community. This article addresses these activities in the form of a systematic literature review (SLR) with an emphasis on the recognition and practice of basic ethical concepts of AI. To the best of our knowledge, no such SLR has been conducted in this domain in past. In this SLR, research articles have been collected between the span of 2015 to 2020. A total of 784 articles have been analysed from which only 44 papers were selected for their proposed works. The analysis founds a consensus among specific standards of AI and commonly applied principles for clarity, equality, accountability, non-maleficence, and secrecy. This article presents a comprehensive review of the schemes developed and applied by the researchers for introduction of AI ethics. In this review, it has been noted that ethical standards must be integrated with all aspects of AI product life cycle.