I'd rather have a section of the conference that's clearly dedicated to ethical issues in AI - or - mandating rigorous discussion in papers where it is clearly

I'd rather have a section of the conference that's clearly dedicated to ethical issues in AI - or - mandating rigorous discussion in papers where it is clearly warranted (ie, anything concerning facial recognition/generation, de-identification, etc) than asking all authors to write an additional section. NeurIPS is an extraordinarily competitive conference. Most authors will look at it as another way to potentially be rejected by a reviewer/area chair (in spite of all assurances about the process), and will write something incredibly trite and bland to make sure nobody is upset. Another concern is that this leads to a death by a thousand cuts - it's very easy to justify asking authors to write an additional section - but - if someone with sufficient authority doesn't say no, the logical endpoint is something like the application process for tenure track positions, where you need to produce something in the order of hundreds of pages (teaching statement, research statement, cover letter, diversity statement, list of funding, recommendation letters, etc).