  Amidst decline in public trust in technology, computing ethics have taken
center stage, and critics have raised questions about corporate ethics washing.
Yet few studies examine the actual implementation of AI ethics values in
technology companies. Based on a qualitative analysis of technology workers
tasked with integrating AI ethics into product development, we find that
workers experience an environment where policies, practices, and outcomes are
decoupled. We analyze AI ethics workers as ethics entrepreneurs who work to
institutionalize new ethics-related practices within organizations. We show
that ethics entrepreneurs face three major barriers to their work. First, they
struggle to have ethics prioritized in an environment centered around software
product launches. Second, ethics are difficult to quantify in a context where
company goals are incentivized by metrics. Third, the frequent reorganization
of teams makes it difficult to access knowledge and maintain relationships
central to their work. Consequently, individuals take on great personal risk
when raising ethics issues, especially when they come from marginalized
backgrounds. These findings shed light on complex dynamics of institutional
change at technology companies.
