AI provides significant opportunities, but alongside those are challenges, among them ethical concerns including those about accountability and trust.
Imagine you start your workday by checking your voice messages; among them is one from your boss instructing you to perform a certain task. You complete the task and email her to confirm that you’ve received her message and finished the task. A few minutes later she replies that she doesn’t know what you are talking about – she didn’t leave a voice message and she definitely did not want you to carry out that task.
Amongst its many capabilities, artificial intelligence (AI) has the ability to convincingly clone individual human voices (and faces, as seen in examples of deep fakes, or synthetic, AI-generated media). Voice-mimicking software is being used not only to generate the voices for virtual assistants and chatbots, but to commit theft. In one incident, the voice of a senior executive was cloned, then used to instruct an employee to transfer money to a bank account belonging to the people behind the scam.
We are currently moving from an age of narrow AI, where AI can be programmed to operate in a pre-defined range to perform one specific task, to strong AI, which has the ability to reason, make independent decisions, and more closely mimic human intelligence. As with any disruptive technology, AI provides significant opportunities, but alongside those are challenges, among them ethical concerns including those about accountability and trust.
Read the full article by Laura Friedrich, and hear from her at our upcoming half-day PD seminar, Ethical Leadership in an Age of AI. This seminar contains 4 hours of ethics content.
Laura Friedrich, FCPA, FCGA, is a principal at the research, standards, and professional education consultancy firm, Friedrich & Friedrich corporation, whose clients include IFAC, global accounting bodies and other professional regulators and educators. She also serves as a technical advisor to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants and is a presenter with CPABC’s professional development program on the topic of ethical leadership.
Originally published in CPABC Newsroom on October 5, 2020.
