Ethics & the Business of AI
By Lillien Waller
Not so many years ago, the average person thought of artificial intelligence as the stuff of movies, even though explorations into machine learning date back more than seventy years. Lest you think ChatGPT marked the advent of a new era, AI has been an integral part of everyday life for most of this century in the form of smartphones, streaming platforms, smart home devices, and more.
When we say artificial intelligence today, however, we are most often referring to ChatGPT, Claude, and their generative AI ilk—the programs that can reason, predict, create, and iterate, producing human-like text, images, audio, and more within seconds. Technology with such awesome capabilities benefits our lives and work in a number of ways, and the majority of Americans and more than one billion people globally already rely on these tools. But what challenges does the proliferation of AI present? And what is the role of ethics for AI companies?
“AI is a tool like any other and can be used for good or for ill,” says David Gleason '79, an expert in ethics, business, and technology, and founder and managing editor of MyEthics.net. “We can make technology mimic human behavior. But Big AI has invested hundreds of billions of dollars into building these systems, thinking that they’re going to get subscribers to pay for the benefits of the tool. And it makes sense, right? But the hype and the push are largely financially driven because these companies need to get people and businesses hooked so they’ll be willing to pay more money for it. The entire ethics enterprise is about intention.”
David has been pondering the benefits and challenges of AI for a long time, especially as he has built a career in information technology helping businesses and nonprofit organizations establish and articulate their values and align those values with stakeholders. He became interested in the intersection of philosophy and science at Commonwealth, as a member of one of the last graduating classes under the leadership of founder Charles Merrill. He went on to double major in physics and philosophy at Connecticut College, and his master’s thesis at Boston University focused on the ethics and social implications of information technology at the height of the dot-com boom.
“I got into ethics in technology in the ’90s because I saw that technology was being used for nefarious purposes and also that deployments of technologies were just going terribly wrong,” David explains. “I worked mostly with nonprofits, implementing hundreds of networks and software systems. And what I kept finding was that the technology worked but that there was a gap between what the technology could do and how people were trying to deploy it. In other words, the technology did not align with the needs of the organizations very well, which got me into the question of, well, what are the needs of the organization? What are they trying to accomplish? What are their motives and what are their objectives? Then let’s design a technology system to meet those needs. But let’s start with what the organization is all about and build a technology to amplify their work.
“What I realized was that there was a big gap that could be filled with a better understanding of the ethics of everything from project management to systems delivery to training and everything else. And so I started working on implementations through the ethics lens. Not that ethics never generated much revenue, but people saw that I had integrity and they could trust me. These days, I can quickly establish both my ethics chops and that I seek to help others ‘do well by doing right,’” he adds, quoting Ben Franklin.
AI companies could take a page from this playbook—because alignment, trust, and good intentions don’t seem to be driving these businesses, David says. He isn’t discounting AI’s usefulness; the technology has enormous benefits, and he even uses it (judiciously) for his own research. But this doesn’t diminish AI’s ethical problems, many of which are related to sprawling physical and virtual infrastructure under scant public regulation.
Large language models are capable of advanced problem solving around questions of sustainability, but what are the long-term repercussions of the technology itself on the environment? AI data centers use astronomical amounts of water, raw materials, and electricity. Global AI-related infrastructure is on pace to consume six times more electricity than the country of Denmark. This year (2026) could see data centers collectively become the fifth-largest global consumer of electricity—behind Japan but ahead of Russia—at nearly 1,050 terawatt-hours. These are just a few of the urgent environmental concerns that accompany AI (including generative AI) and the businesses that create and deploy the technology.
“I don’t think that ethics are even a consideration at this point. I just think they’re doing whatever they want. AI companies are capturing return on investment. They’re going to push whatever will sell, and they’re going to tell people whatever they want to hear. This sounds really cynical. And I don’t mean to be. But at the end of the day, it’s about intention. It’s about what you’re using the tool to do and the effect that it has on people. I would also say that the stakeholder question is paramount. Who are your stakeholders? How do you identify and properly describe them? And how do you treat them with respect?”
More and more these days, David is building community, in part, around questions of ethics and technology through MyEthics.net, which he started a few years ago. He wanted a place where he could think about the role of ethics in tough issues but also where other people could participate and find resources. He notes that it’s still early in the site’s development, but there’s a twice-monthly newsletter, and David hosts two in-person roundtables per month, all taking a deep dive on the same topic. The first roundtable in fall 2025 explored ethics and the cost of healthcare. Spring 2026 roundtables addressed “The Social Impact of AI” and “The Power of Attention.”
“The site is not yet mature, but it’s coming along. I thought, ‘If we get three or four people at the first roundtable session, that would be great—a nice little discussion.’ Then ten people showed up. Now the roundtables are close to thirty people who come and go, fourteen, fifteen at each meeting. I think there’s a real hunger for this. People feel out of control these days and I think it provides them with a chance to sink their teeth into something meaningful.”
Lillien Waller is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her essays focus primarily on the intersection of art and personal history. In 2023, she was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to profile interdisciplinary artists of color in her hometown, Detroit. This article originally appeared in the summer 2026 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.