  Several high-profile events, such as the mass testing of emotion recognition
systems on vulnerable sub-populations and using question answering systems to
make moral judgments, have highlighted how technology will often lead to more
adverse outcomes for those that are already marginalized. At issue here are not
just individual systems and datasets, but also the AI tasks themselves. In this
position paper, I make a case for thinking about ethical considerations not
just at the level of individual models and datasets, but also at the level of
AI tasks. I will present a new form of such an effort, Ethics Sheets for AI
Tasks, dedicated to fleshing out the assumptions and ethical considerations
hidden in how a task is commonly framed and in the choices we make regarding
the data, method, and evaluation. I will also present a template for ethics
sheets with 50 ethical considerations, using the task of emotion recognition as
a running example. Ethics sheets are a mechanism to engage with and document
ethical considerations before building datasets and systems. Similar to survey
articles, a small number of ethics sheets can serve numerous researchers and
developers.
