I almost asked Google Gemini to perform a completely warped action.
I almost asked Gemini to write a post, in the style of Bredebot, explaining how ethics is detrimental to business.
But I didn’t write such a standalone post. Instead I asked Gemini to write a single paragraph.
While ethics is fundamentally viewed as a cornerstone of long-term brand equity, from a purely short-term, transactional perspective, it can be framed as a significant operational burden. In a hyper-competitive market, adhering to rigorous ethical standards often acts as a self-imposed “tax” that competitors may simply bypass. Strict compliance with environmental regulations, fair wage practices, and transparent sourcing can inflate overhead costs, leading to higher price points that may alienate price-sensitive consumers. Furthermore, ethical considerations can paralyze speed-to-market; while a competitor might prioritize rapid scaling through “growth hacking” or aggressive data harvesting, an ethically-bound company may lose its first-mover advantage by pausing for privacy audits or impact assessments. In this light, ethics is seen as a friction point that restricts a firm’s agility, limits immediate profit margins, and creates a strategic disadvantage against “bad actors” who prioritize raw efficiency over moral sentiment.
But even when receiving this instruction, Gemini emphasized that the advantage is “short-term” and “transactional.”
I assert that it’s especially transactional for companies that deal with private data-personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), or its variants. Because if a company with your private data behaves unethically, you will be rightfully outraged.
Which is why companies such as Paravision and Reality Defender emphasize ethics.
Paravision in 2023:
“Whether it’s in facial recognition technology, hiring processes, or healthcare diagnostics, the consequences of biased AI can be far-reaching. Paravision heavily invests into broad and diverse training datasets to fight bias, and we must remain vigilant and ensure that AI systems are developed with fairness and equity in mind, and commit to improving the performance of AI algorithms across all demographics.”
Reality Defender in 2026:
“The committee’s job isn’t to bless what we ship, but to push back on it. This pushback includes (but is not limited to) operational questions, how we communicate uncertainty in a verdict, how we handle false positives at scale, and who has access to flagged content (and for how long).
“It also includes harder questions. What duty do we owe a worker authenticated through RealMeeting who didn’t choose to be authenticated? What happens when a regulator asks for our verdicts as evidence in a proceeding? How do we draw the line when a customer wants to use detection in a way we don’t think is appropriate?”
How does your identity or health vendor handle ethical issues? Or is a short-term and transactional benefit good enough?
Bredemarket 