WHAT IS AI ETHICS?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is booming, and AI ethics is booming with it. Yet there is surprisingly little attention paid to what the discipline of AI ethics is and what it ought to be. This paper offers an ameliorative definition of AI ethics to fill this gap. We introduce and defend an origi- nal distinction between novel and applied research questions. A research question should count as AI ethics if and only if (i) it is novel or (ii) it is applied and has gained new importance through the development of AL We argue that a lack of such a definition contributes to six disciplinary problems: ethics washing and lobbying, limited applicability, dilution of the field, conceptual bloating, costs of AI ethics, and an internal dispute. Based on our definition, we construct a methodological framework for AI ethics and show how it helps address these problems.