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Sometimes the inner call to take a mindfully sharp career turn rises from our core. Such was the case with Katrina Ingram of Edmonton in 2017. After more than a decade immersed in a successful media career, she was ready for meaningful change. In 2018, she began her Master’s in Communications & Technology at the University of Alberta, convinced that in doing so she would discover her new direction.
Not long after beginning her studies, Katrina attended a talk by a prominent AI researcher who shared concerns about how some artificial intelligence was being built and deployed unethically – even harmfully. Intrigued, Katrina approached the speaker afterward, asking if many people were studying the ethical aspects of AI development. He replied, “Not nearly enough.” His answer convinced Katrina to focus her MA research on understanding the ethical choices of AI developers and testing various ethics tools to help improve AI development. Katrina’s new career direction unfolded as her MA research laid the groundwork for her future company: Ethically Aligned AI.
At that time, there were no courses offered in Katrina’s program on the subject of ethics and AI. She now teaches a course in that program – An introduction to AI Systems and Ethics. In order to build her MA program around this subject area, Katrina made key decisions: she reached out to discover communities focused on AI ethics and related areas, such as Women in AI Ethics, the Montreal AI Ethics Institute and ForHumanity.
Katrina also began forming a core community with professors and PhD students interested in AI from the University of Alberta’s humanities, philosophy, law, arts, social sciences and computer science departments. This interdisciplinary community played a crucial aspect of her development in this new research area. Together, they formed reading groups, wrote articles, produced workshops and conducted research.
Katrina also attended conferences on AI, and specifically sought out attendees presenting papers on ethics, privacy and fair machine learning. Through her research, she began to understand how AI had gradually developed over the past few decades. She also recognized that AI ethics would become an important area that all stakeholders would need to recognize as crucial to our human future.
“Ethics are crucial in guiding the development of AI technologies to ensure they are applied in ways that protect human life and rights.”
Katrina understood that AI – like the internet, electricity or the automobile – would continue to significantly impact all human life over the long term. Additionally, AI has the obvious potential to be abused by bad actors, or insufficiently ethical ones. Therefore, Katrina sensed that everyone would soon understand that AI needs to be effectively controlled by regulatory bodies to prevent abuses – something the tech industry continues to resist.
Ethics are crucial in guiding the development of AI technologies to ensure they are applied in ways that protect human life and rights. However, the moral principles ethics derive from are not pre-determined, but are often fought for in courts or through legislation. Hence, Ethically Aligned AI is becoming a growing company of influence in the wild, wild west of AI development. By walking into a random lecture – and by choosing to act upon what she learned there – Katrina inadvertently stepped aboard a future-focused train of impactful thought.
Katrina launched her business, Ethically Aligned AI, in 2021, after receiving a grant from the Government of Canada’s Investment Readiness Program for social enterprises. Her initial pitch was to understand the feasibility of an AI ethics business – in particular, exploring audits for AI business systems. That initial feasibility study showed that Canadian businesses were not thinking about adopting AI, let alone considering its ethical impacts. The concept of AI ethical audits was too early for the market.
Instead, Katrina pivoted to work on AI ethics education. Ethically Aligned AI took on its first contract with Athabasca University to launch an Artificial Intelligence Ethics Micro-Credential in 2021 – the first of its kind offered in Canada and one of only a handful of programs in this space globally.
By 2023, the arrival of ChatGPT led to a groundswell of demand from the public and from business to understand the impacts of generative AI. In less than two years since Ethically Aligned AI had conducted its AI-readiness feasibility study, business sentiment had shifted substantially. Suddenly, not only did organizations understand that AI would affect their business functions, they also recognized the necessity of responsible AI.
Today, Ethically Aligned AI works with business leaders, organizations and educational institutions on responsible AI, privacy and data ethics. Since 2018, Katrina Ingram has moved from MA student to entrepreneur, tracing the trajectory of AI ethics from a little-known niche research area to a cutting-edge field that is today understood as having critical global societal importance.
