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 fully integrate these guidelines. This research aims to assess the adoption of ethical principles in AI/ML within the software development space by analyzing pull requests from 28 AI/ML GitHub projects. Motivated by the observation that only about 3.4% of all pull requests contained ethical keywords - indicating a lack of explicit attention to ethical considerations - we manuallylabeled 400 randomly selected pull requests according to the seven EU ethical guidelines. Addressing the challenge of scalability and consistency in manual labeling, we inves- tigated the use of a zero-shot large language model (LLM), OpenAI’s GPT-4o, to automatically detect ethical AI principles in pull requests. Various prompts and temperature settings were tested to enhance model performance and interpretability. 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. Such a tool would flag high-risk pull requests for ethical review, aiding AI risk assessment in open-source projects, and support the automatic generation of an AI Bill of Materials (AI BOM).