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Review
. 2025;5(3):1931-1940.
doi: 10.1007/s43681-024-00563-x. Epub 2024 Sep 5.

The rise of checkbox AI ethics: a review

Sara Kijewski  1 , Elettra Ronchi  2   3 , Effy Vayena  1
Affiliations
Review

The rise of checkbox AI ethics: a review

Sara Kijewski et al. AI Ethics. 2025.

Abstract

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) sparked the development of principles and guidelines for ethical AI by a broad set of actors. Given the high-level nature of these principles, stakeholders seek practical guidance for their implementation in the development, deployment and use of AI, fueling the growth of practical approaches for ethical AI. This paper reviews, synthesizes and assesses current practical approaches for AI in health, examining their scope and potential to aid organizations in adopting ethical standards. We performed a scoping review of existing reviews in accordance with the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR), systematically searching databases and the web between February and May 2023. A total of 4284 documents were identified, of which 17 were included in the final analysis. Content analysis was performed on the final sample. We identified a highly heterogeneous ecosystem of approaches and a diverse use of terminology, a higher prevalence of approaches for certain stages of the AI lifecycle, reflecting the dominance of specific stakeholder groups in their development, and several barriers to the adoption of approaches. These findings underscore the necessity of a nuanced understanding of the implementation context for these approaches and that no one-size-fits-all approach exists for ethical AI. While common terminology is needed, this should not come at the cost of pluralism in available approaches. As governments signal interest in and develop practical approaches, significant effort remains to guarantee their validity, reliability, and efficacy as tools for governance across the AI lifecycle.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43681-024-00563-x.

Keywords: AI ethics; Artificial intelligence; Governance; Health; Practical approaches; Tools.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interestEV has consulting fees or other honoraria from Johns Hopkins University and Roche diagnostics; participates on a Digital Ethics Advisory Board for Merck and an Ethics Advisory Panel for IQVIA; and is the co-chair of the WHO expert group on ethics and governance of AI in Health.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Adapted PRISMA-ScR (Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses) 2020 flow diagram for new scoping reviews [29]
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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