Ethics in AI through the Developer's Prism: A Socio-Technical Grounded Theory Literature Review and Guidelines

The term 'ethics' is widely used, explored, and debated in the context of developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. In recent years, there have been numerous incidents that have raised the profile of ethical issues in AI development and led to public concerns about the proliferation of AI technology in our everyday lives. But what do we know about the views and experiences of those who develop these systems - the AI developers? We conducted a Socio-Technical Grounded Theory Literature Review (ST-GTLR) of 30 primary empirical studies that included AI developers' views on ethics in AI to derive five categories that discuss AI developers' views on AI ethics: developer's awareness, perception, needs, challenges, and approach. These are underpinned by multiple codes and concepts that we explain with evidence from the included studies. Through the steps of advanced theory development, we also derived a set of relationships between these categories and presented them as five hypotheses, leading to the 'theory of ethics in AI through the developer's prism' which explains that developers' awareness of AI ethics directly leads to their perception about AI ethics and its implementation as well as to identifying their needs, and indirectly leads to identifying their challenges and coming up with approaches (applied and potential strategies) to overcome them. The theory provides a landscape view of the key aspects that concern AI developers when it comes to ethics in AI. We also share an agenda for future research studies and recommendations for developers, managers, and organisations to help in their efforts to better implement ethics in AI.