While I could agree to a point, it's hard to separate the flavour of ethics from the need for reflection itself.
A thorny ethics example from my own role was a decade+ ago I was hired to do a privacy impact assessment (PIA) on an ML solution for detecting benefits fraud. It had all the ingredients for a complete debacle: "artificial intelligence"(?!), a vulnerable population, credit reporting companies, arms length government agencies, highly paid consulting firms, etc. What we delivered was modifications to the system to solve their core fraud risk problem without making peoples lives (more of) a dystopian hell.
Privacy is the currently the technology ethics department in large institutions, and I really see the AI ethics people as fancy privacy people with more math. Privacy has moved on from being a technical discipline that old hacker dudes like me did to being one largely done by women with law degrees. The tension between the security architect competency and the privacy policy analyst is still there in the field, but now we all see how they add a lot of value without needing the bottom-up view of a technologist.
The flavour of ethics in the privacy field has evolved, and I was absolutely suspicious of the change, as if you weren't a cypherpunk in privacy in 2005, you were a 5th column infiltrator looking to co-opt it for corporate ends - but of course, that's not true. Anyway a lot of text to say don't throw out babies with bathwater on AI ethics, but I'm saying they're not as new as anyone thinks, and if you think privacy is important, then you will probably recognize ethics in AI is important as well.