Google Offers to Help Others With the Tricky Ethics of AI

Google’s cloud division will soon invite customers to outsource something less tangible than CPUs and disk drives—the rights and wrongs of using artificial intelligence.The company plans to launch new AI ethics services before the end of the year. Microsoft and Google say they now review both new AI products and potential deals for ethics concerns, and have turned away business as a result.Tracy Frey, who works on AI strategy at Google’s cloud division, says the same trends have prompted customers who rely on Google for powerful AI to ask for ethical help, too. Microsoft and Amazon quickly said they would pause their own sales to law enforcement until more regulation was in place.In the end, signing up customers for AI ethics services may depend on convincing companies who turned to Google to move faster into the future that they should in fact move more slowly.Late last year, Google launched a facial recognition service limited to celebrities that is aimed primarily at companies that need to search or index large collections of entertainment video.