> Do they actually add useful insight, or do they serve more as a PR thing?

The one we hear about most are pure PR.

> Is there anything you think AI ethics as a field can do to be more useful and to get more change?

Yes. Work on AI alignment. It is a broader problem than just ethics. It is also about having models generate truthful and grounded answers. I am extremely doubtful of the current trend to use RLHF for it, we need other approaches. But this is real ML development work, not just PR production. That would be an extremely useful way to steer erhicalAI efforts