Safety & ethics
AI ethics is the study of how AI should be built and used so that it is fair, transparent, respects privacy, and benefits people rather than harming them.
AI makes decisions about people: who gets a loan, which resume gets read, what news you see. AI ethics asks whether those decisions are fair and who is accountable when they go wrong. It brings together engineers, philosophers, lawyers, and the communities affected by the technology.
There are four core themes. Fairness means no group is treated worse. Transparency means people can know when AI is used and why it decided something. Privacy means data is not misused. Accountability means a human answers for the outcome. Questions about jobs, energy use, and copyright belong here too.
Ethics is different from safety, though they overlap. Safety asks whether the system behaves as intended. Ethics asks whether the intention itself is right. Many companies now have review boards. Laws such as the European Union's AI Act, in force from 2024, turn some ethical principles into legal rules.
A school debates whether to let an AI grade essays, weighing speed against the risk that it marks unusual writing styles unfairly.