CFP: "AI regulation and policy-making: ethical and legal issues on unstable ground" - Lexicon of Public Ethics journal

LEXICON OF PUBLIC ETHICS | LESSICO DI ETICA PUBBLICA - 2/2024

Call for Papers

AI regulation and policy-making: ethical and legal issues on unstable ground

Edited by Paolo Monti, Norberto Albano

Calls for the regulation of AI technologies are numerous and have been raised by a wide range of actors, from civil society advocacy groups to political movements and even industry leaders, who, in a surprising move, are simultaneously pushing AI-based services to the public at an unprecedented pace and calling for top-down regulation. The lack of specific legal frameworks and regulations has initially left a lot of room for case-by-case initiatives by regulators and educational institutions, along with a fairly broad academic and public debate about the risks and opportunities. Over time, some more organic normative projects have emerged, such as the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, the White House’s Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, and the Governing AI for Humanity interim report of the United Nations AI Advisory Body.

The urgency of these regulatory decisions is confronted by the vast diversity of AI technologies and applications, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, by the very unstable foundations on which the normative discourse on the use of AI must to be built, both conceptually and practically. 

Conceptually, the rapid advances in AI technologies challenge the applicability of traditional concepts of responsibility and accountability, authorship and creativity, intelligence and agency, personality and subjectivity, which constitute the basic lexicon of much normative discourse.

Practically, the development of new forms of AI takes the form of a rapid diversification of its applications and a multiplication of new features and capabilities, which exposes any new specific regulation and policy to the risk of premature obsolescence, as tech companies rush their new products to the public to keep up with the competition.

Finally, the transformation at hand is further complicated by the consideration that the use of AI technologies, perhaps more than the use of almost any previous technology, is not just an object to which regulations and policies are to be applied but may in turn affect the regulatory and policy-making processes. Generative AI is already changing the way texts are edited, information is gathered, and public opinion is formed. The first cases of legislation drafted using large language models are emerging, and there is growing concern about the impact of these AI systems on the democratic process.

In this preliminary framework, many questions arise for philosophers and legal experts, but also for scholars in the fields of human-machine interaction, political science, sociology and education.

Our journal is looking for contributions that could address the following research areas (and more):

1.       Ethical and meta-ethical issues (applicability of normative concepts, responsibility and accountability of AI systems, moral status of AI systems, etc.).

2.       Constitutional issues (applicability of constitutional principles to the field of AI, proposals of revisions, etc.).

3.       Specific legal issues (corporate law, data protection, etc.).

4.       Human-machine interaction issues (analysis of cases, definitions of harm, etc.).

5.       Political philosophy and socio-political issues (impact of generative AI on democratic elections, use of generative AI in the policy-making process, etc.).

6.       Educational issues (emerging guidelines on the use of AI in education, analysis and evaluation of the integration of AI tools in the educational process, etc.).

The academic journal “Lexicon of Public Ethics” | “Lessico di Etica Pubblica” will dedicate issue 1/2025 ? to these questions. The issue will host articles collected through this call for papers as well as a selection of invited papers written by national and international experts.

The journal remains also open to worthy submissions that cover other relevant topics in the field of public ethics, which will be selected for each issue and published in a specific section.

All essays must be submitted no later than 15 April 2025, at the Editors’ e-mail addresses ([email protected]; [email protected] ; [email protected]). The manuscripts must conform to the editorial guidelines that can be found on the website: http://www.eticapubblica.it/.

Accepted languages are English, Italian, And French. The maximum allowed length is 35.000 characters (including spaces, footnotes and an abstract of max. 150 words to be written in English and Italian or French – if the language of the article is Italian or French), prepared in anonymous form to be compatible with the blind review process. In a second file attached to the same e-mail, authors will specify their name and surname, e-mail address, title and abstract of the paper.

This journal issue will be edited by Paolo Monti (University of Milan-Bicocca) and Norberto Albano (University of Turin).