You've been to the meetings. You've nodded along when someone raises concerns about bias in the training data. You might have even added "responsible AI" to your LinkedIn profile. Congratulations. You're part of the problem.
The entire AI ethics conversation is theater. It's a performance designed to make you feel like something is happening while the actual power dynamics solidify into concrete.
Every hour your team spends debating fairness metrics is an hour you're not asking who owns the infrastructure. Every conference panel on algorithmic bias is a panel that isn't discussing why three companies control the compute layer that everything else depends on.
This isn't an accident.
The big AI labs love funding ethics research. They'll write you a check right now to study bias mitigation techniques. They'll sponsor your workshop on responsible deployment practices. They want you focused on making their models 2% less racist instead of asking why they're the ones who get to build the models in the first place.
You're being handed a very specific set of questions to debate. And you're debating them enthusiastically because it feels like progress.
The real ethical issue isn't whether GPT-4 occasionally generates biased outputs. The real issue is that a handful of companies have monopolistic control over the technology that will define the next decade of human-computer interaction.
Open models versus corporate gatekeeping should be the central ethics debate. Model weights as public infrastructure should be the conversation. Who profits from the deployment layer matters more than any fairness metric you'll ever calculate.
But that conversation doesn't happen in your ethics committee meetings. It doesn't make it into the responsible AI frameworks your company adopts. Because the people writing those frameworks work for the companies that benefit from you not asking those questions.
You're being given ethics homework that never threatens the business model. Notice that?
Look at who funds AI ethics research. Look at who sits on the boards of AI safety organizations. Look at who gets invited to testify when governments start asking questions.
It's the same companies whose power you're supposedly constraining.
Every "ethical framework" that gets adopted somehow ends up requiring the kind of massive computational resources and expert teams that only the biggest players can afford. Weird how that works out. Safety requirements that smaller competitors can't meet. Compliance burdens that favor incumbents.
The ethics conversation isn't happening despite corporate interests. It's happening because of them. You're being handed a script that makes you feel good about your role while reinforcing exactly the power structures you think you're questioning.
The people writing the AI ethics guidelines are funded by the companies building the models. The academic researchers setting safety standards get their compute credits from the labs they're meant to constrain. The whole apparatus is captured from the start.
And you participate because it's easier than acknowledging what's actually happening.
You want to do AI ethics work that matters? Start asking who controls the technology. Start questioning why responsible AI always seems to require partnering with the largest incumbents. Start noticing how every safety standard benefits the companies that can afford compliance teams.
The only ethical stance is recognizing the game for what it is.
You don't need another framework for algorithmic fairness. You don't need better bias detection tools. You need to stop pretending that the conversation you're having is the conversation that matters.
The theater only works if you keep showing up for the performance. Stop buying tickets.
If you want to hear from someone who questions the AI hype cycle from the inside - someone who has been building these systems for decades and watched the theater get constructed in real time - there's more where this came from.