Paper Number
ICIS2026-1383
Paper Type
Completed
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence’s most consequential organizational effects may be its slowest: the cumulative transformation of professional judgment, evaluative criteria, and governance capacity that sustained engagement can produce. This paper reads the One Ring of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which amplifies capability while reconfiguring its bearer, as an analytical lens on these dynamics. My core contribution is corruptive drift, the gradual reshaping of professional judgment through sustained AI engagement, from which I derive strategic restraint as an organizational capability. I develop five propositions and a temporal process model (power amplification, uneven usability, illusion of control, corruptive drift, and dependency and lock-in). The implication for governance is that frameworks designed to catch discrete violations cannot detect a transformation that moves the standard itself, so audits return clean results while auditor and audited drift together. The paper contributes to responsible AI scholarship a middle-range theory of moral consequence and temporal unfolding.
Recommended Citation
Saeedi, Milad, "One Ring to Rule Them All: An Allegory of Artificial Intelligence, Corruptive Drift, and the Limits of Organizational Governance" (2026). ICIS 2026 Proceedings. 1.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2026/ethics/ethics/1
One Ring to Rule Them All: An Allegory of Artificial Intelligence, Corruptive Drift, and the Limits of Organizational Governance
Artificial Intelligence’s most consequential organizational effects may be its slowest: the cumulative transformation of professional judgment, evaluative criteria, and governance capacity that sustained engagement can produce. This paper reads the One Ring of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which amplifies capability while reconfiguring its bearer, as an analytical lens on these dynamics. My core contribution is corruptive drift, the gradual reshaping of professional judgment through sustained AI engagement, from which I derive strategic restraint as an organizational capability. I develop five propositions and a temporal process model (power amplification, uneven usability, illusion of control, corruptive drift, and dependency and lock-in). The implication for governance is that frameworks designed to catch discrete violations cannot detect a transformation that moves the standard itself, so audits return clean results while auditor and audited drift together. The paper contributes to responsible AI scholarship a middle-range theory of moral consequence and temporal unfolding.
Comments
05_Responsibility_and_ethics