Artificial Intelligence presents many complex ethical concerns which are well worth discussing with our students. The Teaching AI Ethics series started as a single post covering the nine areas I’d identified as particularly important to education, from bias and discrimination to reinforcing societal power structures.
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The original post was so popular that I broke it down into nine further posts. Each post includes a detailed discussion of the ethical concern along with links to other articles and resources. There are case studies, discussion questions for a variety of disciplines, and lesson ideas which can be used across the curriculum.
Though I designed these posts with a K-12 audience in mind, they’ve since been picked up at a tertiary level for discussions with pre-service teachers and other undergraduate students. I’ve created this page as a single reference point for all 10 posts.
Here’s a quick list of the posts. Scroll down for more information:
- Bias and discrimination
- Environmental concerns
- Truth and academic integrity
- Copyright
- Privacy
- Datafication
- Emotion recognition
- Human labour
- Power
Original article
This article covers all nine areas and introduces the concept of AI ethics in an education context:
Beginner level
The three articles at this level cover the most commonly discussed ethical concerns with Artificial Intelligence: Bias, environmental concerns, and “truth”. In these articles, you’ll find case studies and discussion points for each area.
Intermediate
At this level, the concepts become more complex and the ethical issues harder to find information on, or more difficult to untangle. This level includes copyright, privacy, and datafication, and offers ways for educators to explore how Artificial Intelligence developers have collected intellectual property and data to train models in ways which don’t always protect users’ rights or privacy.
Advanced
These final three posts deal with the most complex ethical concerns: affect recognition, human labour, and power. These articles explore how AI is already being used to recognise and evaluate human emotions and actions, and how the processes of AI can reinforce societal prejudices and hegemonies. These posts offer discussion points and lesson activities to address these complex issues with students.
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