While implementing with caution, Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds potential to help nations address pressing social issues, such as homelessness, climate change, and healthcare accessibility. With the existing and potential economic and social benefits of AI, it is crucial to integrate AI learning in undergraduate education. This paper presents the preliminary findings of a course project that engages students to learn AI by prototyping solutions to address important social issues in their communities among 120 undergraduate MIS students. Students worked in groups and developed chatbots that addressed a variety of community issues during COVID-19. A survey study shows students’ enhanced understanding and mastery of AI concepts and applications, empowerment of contributing to their communities through AI innovation, and an emerging awareness of diversity, equity, and ethical issues in the community and AI technologies. We conclude with implications of learning AI, innovation, and ethics through the lens of AI for social good.
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Ethics in Artificial Intelligence Education: Preparing Students to Become Responsible Consumers and Developers of AI.
The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) necessitates a need for educating students to
become knowledgeable of AI and aware of its interrelated technical, social, and human
implications. The latter (ethics) is particularly important to K-12 students because they may have
been interacting with AI through everyday technology without realizing it. They may be targeted
by AI generated fake content on social media and may have been victims of algorithm bias in AI
applications of facial recognition and predictive policing. To empower students to recognize
ethics related issues of AI, this paper reports the design and implementation of a suite of ethics
activities embedded in the Developing AI Literacy (DAILy) curriculum. These activities engage
students in investigating bias of existing technologies, experimenting with ways to mitigate
potential bias, and redesigning the YouTube recommendation system in order to understand
different aspects of AI-related ethics issues. Our observations of implementing these lessons
among adolescents and exit interviews show that students were highly engaged and became
aware of potential harms and consequences of AI tools in everyday life after these ethics lessons.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2048746
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10493259
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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