From Green- to Machinewashing: misleading information in the digital age

People today tend not to fall anymore for the unhealthy practice of organisations providing misleading information by about their societal and environmental responsibilities. Greenwashing techniques, which were first noticed in the 1960s, are in fact easier to identify and organisations are urged to 'come clean'. The rise, however, of digital technologies, big data, AI, machine learning etc. poses new challenges in terms of 'digital ethics', leaving it rather unclear how these technologies - and those in the making - will impact the economy and society. Prof. Peter Seele from the USI Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society is an expert in business ethics who has long studied the issue of greenwashing and who has now developed a novel model to identify so-called 'machinewashing' techniques. According to the first definitions that emerged only recently (in 2019), machinewashing is essentially a new form of "green PR" used typically by tech giants to assure of their good intentions surrounding AI and machine learning - and digital technologies and information systems in general - in an attempt to address increasing concerns around issues such as, to name just a few: robots and computer systems making human labour redundant; self-driving cars going awry; mass surveillance; gig economy and proprietary platforms eroding the social welfare state. " Machinewashing involves misleading information about ethical AI communicated or omitted via words, visuals, or the underlying algorithm of AI itself ", write Prof. Seele and  Mario Schultz , post-doc researcher at USI, in their forthcoming article for the Journal of Business Ethics.