Ethics in NLP: Addressing Privacy Concerns in AI-Powered Voice-Activated Systems

Abstract

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has evolved at a high rate, and this is why voice activated systems based on AI are mainstream consumer products like smart speakers, virtual assistants, or text-to-speech tools. Nonetheless, there is a serious implication to privacy issues with NLP machine embedded in these systems considering that most of the time such systems deal with sensitive information about the user. The paper examines the ethics of privacy in voice-activated systems that focus on an AI system and discusses the current challenges to privacy and the ways to reduce them. Primary research questions can be said to be demographic risks to privacy, usefulness of existing privacy preserving technologies, and suggesting what could be done in order to handle the data better. The research methodology will use the review of existing NLP methods, privacy protection algorithms, ethical considerations. It has been found that although privacy preserving methods, e.g. data anonymization, federated learning and the like, can help a lot, they are not truly developed at all in the context of NLP systems. A concluding statement given at the end of the research  includes the necessity to find stronger privacy protection solutions, directions of future studies, and recommendations on how they could build ethical AI frameworks in the context of NLP applications. These contributions will strive to develop a balance between innovationand privacy of users.

Keywords: Privacy, AI, NLP, Ethics, Voice-Activated Systems, Data Protection