Korea issues first AI ethics checklist

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By Lee Kyung-min

The government has outlined the first national standard on how to use artificial intelligence (AI) ethically, in a move to bolster the emerging industry's sustainability and enhance its global presence, the industry ministry said Wednesday.

Korea Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS), an organization affiliated with the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, issued a checklist of possible ethical issues and reviewed factors to be referenced and considered by service developers, providers and users.

The considerations specified for report and review include ethical issues arising in the process of collecting and processing data, the designing and development of AI, and the provision of such services to customers.

The guidelines contain considerations such as transparency, fairness, harmlessness, responsibility, privacy protection, convenience, autonomy, reliability, sustainability and solidarity-enhancing qualities.

These were discussed during a forum organized by the KATS, Wednesday, attended by leading AI industry players and state-run organizations and researchers.

The forum attendees shared ideas to foster ethical and sustainable use of cutting-edge technology, increasingly embraced by industry leaders across the world.

They stressed that establishing clear ethical standards will enable the AI industry to be more responsible, critical to the advancement of high-tech AI services.

Calls have intensified to address the ethical issues concerning the high-productivity, high-efficiency technology, prompted in large part by the recent spread of generative AI services such as Chat generative pre-trained transformer (GPT).

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that uses natural language processing to create conversational dialogue. The language model can respond to questions and compose various written content, including articles, social media posts, essays, code and emails among other things.

The developer of ChatGPT says that it safely generates natural language responses and high-quality content in such a way that it sounds human-like.

Nevertheless, according to the Fountain Institute, an independent online school that teaches advanced user experience (UX) and product skills, ChatGPT can steal design jobs, and can act like it understands human beings, but it does not.

The institute says ChatGPT can propagate disinformation and hate, perpetuate bias and gamify education.

“The forum on the outlining of AI ethical standards is timely, especially since firms are struggling to prepare for appropriate measures,” the ministry said in a statement.