Partially supported by a NULab Seedling Grant.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are reshaping every aspect of human society, raising pressing questions about their ethical implications. As a result, the emerging field of AI ethics has developed at a rapid pace, bringing insights from numerous disciplines. Yet this rapid growth and cross-disciplinary nature can make it challenging for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to keep abreast of the latest developments. This project charts the landscape of the AI ethics field through automated computational methods, integrating natural language processing and network analysis to examine topical structures and map the institutional, co-authorship, and citation networks of the field.
This methodology represents a new initiative in the digital humanities, deploying the techniques of computational network science to foster a data-driven understanding of the emerging AI ethics field, and bringing together computational and philosophical methodologies. We will study a cross-disciplinary corpus of AI ethics papers from PhilPapers, JSTOR, and arXiv. We will use topic modeling tools to identify and analyze emerging themes and trends. We will also construct co-authorship, institutional and citation networks, and deploy community detection algorithms to better understand the structure of these networks.
We will build (1) an open-source Python-based toolkit for analyzing the field of AI ethics, (2) an open-access dataset mapping landscape of the field, (3) interactive visualizations that make complex network relationships accessible to researchers and practitioners and (4) an automated literature review of the state of the art in AI ethics research. These tools and resources will enable scholars to identify emerging ethical frameworks, uncover gaps in current research, and foster more effective collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. We intend for these tools to seed further research on the broader philosophy of AI and information ethics landscapes.
Project Team
- Dr. David Freeborn (Principal Investigator, Assistant Professor in Philosophy, NU London)
- Dr. Brian Ball (Professor in Philosophy, NU London)
- Dr. Alex Cline (Associate Professor in Computer Science, QMUL)
- Dr. Alice Helliwell (Assistant Professor in Philosophy, NU London)
- Kevin Loi-Heng (Research Assistant, NU London)
