CAIC Ethical Considerations in AI 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A healthcare AI system performs better on clinical data from urban hospitals than rural clinics. This is an example of which ethical concern?
- Algorithmic transparency
- Dataset bias (Correct answer)
- Model overfitting
- Data privacy violation
Correct answer: Dataset bias
Dataset bias occurs when training data does not represent the full population, causing the model to underperform for underrepresented groups.
Question 2: Which principle requires that AI decision-making processes be understandable and auditable by humans?
- Autonomy
- Explainability (Correct answer)
- Scalability
- Redundancy
Correct answer: Explainability
Explainability (also called interpretability) ensures that the reasoning behind AI decisions can be understood and reviewed by humans.
Question 3: An AI hiring tool systematically ranks female candidates lower for engineering roles. The most appropriate immediate action is to:
- Retrain on a larger dataset
- Audit the model for discriminatory patterns (Correct answer)
- Switch to a different algorithm
- Increase the decision threshold
Correct answer: Audit the model for discriminatory patterns
Auditing the model identifies whether and how bias manifests before deciding on corrective technical steps.
Question 4: The concept of 'differential privacy' in AI systems primarily protects against:
- Model theft
- Membership inference attacks that reveal individual training records (Correct answer)
- Adversarial input manipulation
- Data poisoning during training
Correct answer: Membership inference attacks that reveal individual training records
Differential privacy adds statistical noise so that outputs cannot be used to infer whether any specific individual's data was in the training set.
Question 5: Which ethical framework evaluates AI actions based on the greatest good for the greatest number of people?
- Deontological ethics
- Virtue ethics
- Utilitarian ethics (Correct answer)
- Contractarian ethics
Correct answer: Utilitarian ethics
Utilitarian ethics judges the morality of an action by its outcomes, favoring those that maximize overall well-being.
Question 6: A company deploys an AI chatbot that collects user data without explicit consent. This violates which core AI ethics principle?
- Accountability
- Reliability
- Informed consent and autonomy (Correct answer)
- Scalability
Correct answer: Informed consent and autonomy
Informed consent requires that individuals be clearly told how their data will be used and actively agree before collection.
Question 7: When an AI system produces a decision with life-altering consequences (e.g., parole denial), which safeguard is most critical?
- High model accuracy
- Ability for human override and review (Correct answer)
- Low latency response time
- Automated retraining pipeline
Correct answer: Ability for human override and review
High-stakes decisions require meaningful human oversight so errors or biases can be caught and corrected before causing harm.
CAIC Ethical Considerations in AI 2
A healthcare AI system performs better on clinical data from urban hospitals than rural clinics.
This is an example of which ethical concern?