AI Resources for Educators : Societal Concerns

"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. ... 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."

"An MIT graduate was caught by surprise when she prompted an artificial intelligence image generator to create a professional headshot for her LinkedIn profile, and it instead changed her race."

"Sadly, all of these biases are assumptions that many people also make. But AI often amplifies them, says Kalluri. It paints a world that is more biased than reality. Other researchers have shared similar concerns"

"Images showing people of color in German military uniforms from World War II that were created with Google’s Gemini chatbot have amplified concerns that artificial intelligence could add to the internet’s already vast pools of misinformation as the technology struggles with issues around race. Now Google has temporarily suspended the A.I. chatbot’s ability to generate images of any people and has vowed to fix what it called “inaccuracies in some historical” depictions."

"My avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while my male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors."

"The world according to Stable Diffusion is run by White male CEOs. Women are rarely doctors, lawyers or judges. Men with dark skin commit crimes, while women with dark skin flip burgers."

"The rising computer processing demands from AI are increasing freshwater consumption to cool thousands of servers housed in warehouse-sized data centers and increasing unhealthful air pollution from coal power plants that provide much of the electricity."
"For example, several tech companies are planning to build large scale data centers in the Phoenix, Ariz. Region. Each is expected to use as much as 1 million to 5 million gallons of water a day — even though this desert region is increasingly strapped for water because of declining flows of the Colorado River.

“They don’t have to run lots of disproportionately power-hungry servers in Arizona to exhaust their water resources,” he said. “They can train the AI models in other places. They can route their workloads from Arizona to, let’s say, Washington.”

"A.I. threatens our clean energy transition, not only because of its massive energy use, though that’s one obvious reason, but also because of the carbon-intensive materials it demands, including concrete, aluminum, rare earth—and lithium, which is also needed for electric vehicles.

Those same materials are also toxic, leaving the world with a dangerous mess to clean up when they reach the end of their useful life. Whatever “generative” A.I. generates, one thing it certainly creates is e-waste—already one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world—as it drives server and chip design innovation, leaving a phenomenal amount of used equipment in its wake. "

"Each time you use AI to generate an image, write an email, or ask a chatbot a question, it comes at a cost to the planet.

In fact, generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University."

This free ebook contains lessons to help teach the UN Sustainable Development Goals through the lens of "Ecomedia Literacy," which is a method of critically evaluating the environmental impact of media and technology.

"In January 2020, Robert Williams spent 30 hours in a Detroit jail because facial recognition technology suggested he was a criminal. The match was wrong, and Mr. Williams sued....Law enforcement agencies across the country use facial recognition technology to try to identify criminals whose misdeeds are caught on camera. In Michigan, the software compares an unknown face to those in a database of mug shots or drivers’ license photos. In other jurisdictions, the police use tools, like Clearview AI, that search through photos scraped from social media sites and the public internet."

"Crisis Text Line is one of the world’s most prominent mental health support lines, a tech-driven nonprofit that uses big data and artificial intelligence to help people cope with traumas such as self-harm, emotional abuse and thoughts of suicide.

But the data the charity collects from its online text conversations with people in their darkest moments does not end there: The organization’s for-profit spinoff uses a sliced and repackaged version of that information to create and market customer service software."

"In 2019 it was revealed that the Dutch tax authorities had used a self-learning algorithm to create risk profiles in an effort to spot child care benefits fraud.

Authorities penalized families over a mere suspicion of fraud based on the system’s risk indicators. Tens of thousands of families — often with lower incomes or belonging to ethnic minorities — were pushed into poverty because of exorbitant debts to the tax agency. Some victims committed suicide. More than a thousand children were taken into foster care.

The Dutch tax authorities now face a new €3.7 million fine from the country's privacy regulator. In a statement released April 12, the agency outlined several violations of the EU's data protection rulebook, the General Data Protection Regulation, including not having a legal basis to process people's data and hanging on to the information for too long."

"The music labels allege in the lawsuits that building services Suno or Udio requires “copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings” in order to train their models, and that both AI companies have been “deliberately evasive” about what exactly they used.

But it’s “obvious” what their music generators were trained on, according to the lawsuits. Their models could only succeed in producing such realistic songs, the suits stated, if they had been trained on “vast quantities of sound recordings from artists across every genre, style, and era” — many of which remain copyrighted by these record labels."

"Scarlett Johansson threatened legal action against OpenAI for allegedly copying and imitating her voice after she refused to license it to the company. According to the actress, OpenAI asked her to be one of the voices called “Sky” for its newest AI system. She declined, though she said that didn’t stop chief executive Sam Altman. “When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference,” she wrote in a statement.

Johansson said that the similarity was intentional, pointing to Altman tweeting “Her” — a reference to her role as an AI assistant who forms an intimate relationship with a human in Her. She’s hired legal counsel, who wrote two letters to OpenAI, directing them to detail the process by which they created the “Sky” voice."

"As the lawsuit details, the plaintiffs discovered that their work was part of Google's Imagen image generator's initial training data after Google released a paper about it in 2022 that noted it had used the publicly-available LAION-400M dataset. This "Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network," as the name suggests, contains some 400 million images and captions to help train image generators — including, as the artists note in their suit, their copyrighted work."

"Authors are suing Nvidia for copyright infringement. They claim that the chip maker used their books without permission to train large language models on NeMo."

"OpenAI’s GPT-4 reproduces the most copyrighted content from prompts among four popular large language models, according to new research from AI startup Patronus AI."

"The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.

The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information."

"Text-based generative AI technologies require the ingestion of vast amounts of data, including tens or hundreds of thousands of books. AI companies, so far, have not sought permission or offered compensation to the authors whose books and other writings are being used in training generative AI technologies, a practice that the Authors Guild stringently opposes. To make matters worse, all of the large book AI training datasets that we are aware of were compiled from ebook piracy sites—precisely because there are no legal databases of books that are on the open internet, and AI developers have not obtained licenses to do so."

"Long-running nonprofit Common Crawl has been a boon to researchers for years. But now its role in AI training data has triggered backlash from publishers."

"Copyright activists are on a mission to wipe a popular generative AI training set from the Internet. Success could alter the industry -- and who controls it."

"...But people didn’t just find “Crush!” puzzling or ineffective. They found it gross and offensive. This is because we haven’t just discarded our expectation of novel new technology. We’ve also replaced it with a growing awareness of tech’s aims: the data-harvesting, the desire to increase screen time at any cost, the monopolistic business practices, the A.I. tools that threaten artistic careers. After a decade during which it felt as if computers were empowering human creativity, they now feel like a symbol of the forces that stand in creativity’s way and starve it of oxygen."

AI video editing tools make it very easy to create deepfake videos, and students need to know the potentially damaging effects of this type of use, including criminal charges.

Author and clinical psychologist Lisa Strohman, who focuses on device/tech addiction and overuse, is interviewed in this short article.

While not technically focused on AI, the book "Anxious Generation" makes a strong case that children's overuse of technology is harmful. Some people are concerned that AI could lead to further device dependence, especially if they rely on social chatbots. This link takes you to the official website of Jonathan Haidt's book where you can download the PDFs which he cites as evidence in the book, among other information.

Article about National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) and its use of an AI chatbot named Tessa, which was shut down after a user received triggering weight loss advice.