How business can add ethics to decision making

from Antonino Vaccaro AND Rosa Fioravante

In the onslaught of artificial intelligence in recent years, many business leaders are trying to balance rapidly adopting technology with protecting human creativity.

When AI tools can generate text, images, video and audio in seconds, what constitutes creative expression? What makes him human? Why is it important to preserve human creative expression?

Considering the potential economic opportunities presented by the adoption of generative AI, decision makers may face an ethical dilemma of choosing whether to prioritize speed in technological adoption, or devote time and resources to ensure ethical compliance in the use of technology. for people to flourish.

This is not the only ethical dilemma facing business leaders. But we specifically wanted to understand the ethics around creativity, since one of the innovations of generative AI is that it has the potential to automate, and/or augment and integrate human creative expression, that most human of activities.

Generative AI threatens human expression in at least two ways: by overriding existing creative work through its use without proper permission or recognition, and by replacing creative work in organizations.

For example, a group of news organizations led by New York Times has sued ChatGPT creator OpenAI for using their articles without consent or payment — which they claim is massive copyright infringement — to train its big-language models. At the same time, more than a quarter of work tasks in art, design, entertainment and sports could be automated with AI, according to a Goldman Sachs report.

To understand ethics, we begin by looking at the foundations of creativity through the lens of personalism, a worldview that emphasizes the centrality of the human person, the starting point of all ontological and epistemological meaning. Personalism believes in human exceptionalism and irreplaceability, and thus places great importance on human attributes that should never be ignored. Personalism also emphasizes the role of creativity in expressing one’s inner morality and, therefore, one’s dignity.

Since generative AI affects a morally salient dimension of human life, decisions about its use must be rooted in ethics. Organizations bear the responsibility to ensure their economic sustainability through technological innovation, as well as foster human flourishing through creative expression.

3 concepts to understand human creative expression

Thus, we build on this understanding to present a three-dimensional model based on the concepts of uniqueness, relationality and unpredictability:

UNIQUE

The originality of a product stems directly from the uniqueness and participation of the creator in the creative act. Creative expression is understood as the expression of the inner self, and uniqueness is a quality that distinguishes every human being.

With generative AI, the lack of direct creator involvement undermines claims to the uniqueness of production. This may not be important in some applications: for example, a mass market advertising campaign may not be completely unique. But where it is uniquely important, a participatory approach is needed, in which creative professionals contribute knowledge on the compatibility of AI deployment with creative processes and objectives. This involves collaborative decision-making processes that bring together creative professionals and organizational stakeholders.

Relativity

Artistic creation is an expression of the creator’s inner self, but it is also closely related to their dynamics with others. There is a give and take, a process of mutual recognition, between the creator and the audience.

In industries that rely on generative AI for artistic and creative design, careful consideration must be given to relationships between creators and external stakeholders. Generative AI speeds up the creative process and enables the exploration of multiple possibilities in a shorter amount of time, but it lacks the constant exchange between different perspectives inherent in human interaction. Again, collaboration is key: organizations must integrate professionals skilled in rapid engineering with humanistic experts in artistic and intellectual endeavors. This multidisciplinary approach ensures that the relational aspect of the creative process is preserved, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of audience needs and the broader social impact of creative outcomes.

Unpredictability

In personalist thinking, the act of creation revolves around the exercise of freedom beyond necessity. A person is not limited to choosing between already existing options, but rather can create new options, scenarios and possibilities. The act of creation is the act of pushing something new into the existing world.

But what if a machine creates something harmful or inappropriate? People in the circuit can contribute to various stages of the AI ​​process, including data curation and content validation. This can be achieved by reinforcing the presence of human reviewers to evaluate AI-generated results, flagging certain content before such models are published.

Much of the debate around generative AI and creative expression has focused on outcomes. The results are important, but we believe that organizations should start with the people who create and the foundations that support human expression when making decisions about AI deployment. By doing so, they bring ethics into the decision-making process.

Antonino Vaccaro is a professor in the Department of Business Ethics at IESE Business School. Rosa Fioravante is a researcher at the IESE Center for Business in Society and teaches a course on Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at the Católica School of Business and Economics in Lisbon.