Since 2023, MIT Sloan Management Review has published debates around the responsible use of AI (RAI). The debates were based on specific questions or statements raised to a panel of experts, who were asked to express and explain their dis/agreement with the question or statement (from strongly disagree to strongly agree). Our CEO and co-founder, Dr. Richard Benjamins, has participated in all those debates. This series of blog posts gathers his responses to the 14 debates held on RAI.

All blog posts in the series have the same structure. The title is the question, followed by the rate of dis/agreement, and the brief text is the position of Richard. Responses were limited to 1200 characters, so the posts are short.

This is the fifth post in the series.

RAI constrains AI-related innovation

Disagree

Artificial intelligence by itself, is neither responsible nor irresponsible. It is the application of AI to specific use cases that makes it responsible or not. Innovation means to bring new things to the market. RAI implies that when developing or buying innovative systems that use AI, one considers the social and ethical impact of these systems during the full lifecycle. If negative impacts are detected and cannot be mitigated, an explicit (risk-based) decision must be made to continue or not. But this is (or should be) true for any innovation regardless of the use of AI. By not wasting resources on innovations that we don’t want to happen, we can increase our resources dedicated to desired AI applications, and therefore even boost AI-related innovations.

Responsible AI is a mindset and methodology that -by design- helps focus on innovations that maximise positive impact and minimise negative impacts.

Moreover, applying the RAI methodology by design, helps detecting and mitigating ethical risks early on, and thus prevents organizations from solving costly “after launch” reputational and ethical problems. And finally, a well-functioning RAI governance model serves as a safety net, stimulating innovation because people can innovate freely knowing that ethical risks will be detected early on.

The full debate is available here.