The Next Wave: An Ethical Compass For AI-Based Software Development

Ethical principles are fundamental for the long-term sustainable growth of AI/ML; however, recent research highlights that many projects have yet to full integrate these guidelines. This research work aims to assess the current rate of adoption of ethical principles in AI/ML within the software development space. We collected 96,254 pull requests from 28 AI/ML GitHub projects and randomly selected 400 pull requests for manual labeling based on the seven EU ethical guidelines. To address the challenge of scalability and consistency in manual labeling, we investigated the use of a zero-shot large language model (LLM), OpenAI’s GPT-4o. ThisLLM was leveraged to automatically detect ethical AI principles in our sample of pull requests. Our findings demonstrate that GPT-4o has the potential to support ethical compliance in software development. Looking ahead, we envision automating the scanning of code changes for ethical concerns, similar to vulnerability detection models. This tool would flag high-risk pull requests for ethical review, aiding AI risk assessment in open-source projects and supporting the automatic generation of an AI Bill of Materials (AI BOM).