AI and Ethical use
As a new and rapidly evolving tool that will powerfully affect education and most other social and cultural domains, generative AI presents fundamental concerns about how AI tools can or ought to be used. As those concerns develop and as ways of addressing them emerge and change in turn, we will all need to pivot frequently and reassess how we use those tools and how we encourage or monitor how our students use them.
With the understanding that these principles are not carved in stone, here are our top five considerations for promoting the ethical use of generative AI tools:
- Keep considerations of ethics on your radar. Be mindful of the need for vigilance, particularly in the early stages of this technology. Identify the ethical considerations relevant to your discipline, as well as considerations for integrating AI into teaching and learning.
- Recognize diversity, equity, and inclusion concerns as central to the use and proliferation of AI tools. Consider the accessibility of generative AI tools to all users and how AI, which uses the publicly available data it was trained on, can perpetuate biased, discriminatory, or inaccurate information. How will you help students learn to identify and mitigate these issues with AI output?
- Learn who can use or own the data that AI tools receive as input or produce as output. Large language models store input to use as training data. Explain to students that AI tools store and use their data and avoid inputting student-generated content into AI without their consent. Consider and discuss potential copyright concerns with students. For example: Who owns the product of the AI tool: the user who crafted the initial prompt, the rights-holder of the data that the AI consulted to generate that output, or the owner of the AI tool itself?
- Consider how our uses of generative AI technology will affect the future. Among the many potential implications of the impact of AI on data governance, politics, the media, and the environment, these tools also call upon us to explore what and how we teach students about using AI. How they see us model the role of users, how we restrict and permit their uses of the technology, and how we train them to deploy these tools in their later lives and careers are all questions of significant reach and impact.
- Encourage students to be critical consumers of these technologies. Generative AI tools will extend our reach and grasp for the foreseeable future, and it’s important to encourage students to use AI productively. However, an uncritical use of generative AI tools–one that assumes that AI-generated material is always correct, accurate, fair, and unbiased, for example–can be harmful. Make your students skilled but skeptical consumers of these new tools. Encourage students to validate AI output using other sources.
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