Abstract
Many institutions across the world and in Hong Kong have adopted artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with haste. Taking an anthropological and consequentialist view of technoethics, caution will be recommended in this talk, given the many risks and unknowns surrounding how AI usage could affect teaching, learning, and human societies overall.
Three main areas will be covered: culture, environment, and care.
Culture
Critical AI studies have already highlighted how AI systems can perpetuate inequalities and systemic biases. This is because language-learning models (LLMs) are based on datasets influenced by larger marginalization processes, producing effects of erased cultures, knowledges and perspectives in AI-generated output. An important ethical point to consider is how our student values and knowledge bases are now shaped by generative AI more than by teachers, parents and other sources of information. How will biases influence students’ views of politics, history and social issues in Hong Kong? What will their cultural values be in our AI-assisted futures?
Environment
Studies have found that one search using an LLM (even if simply saying ‘hello’) equates to a significant amount of energy and water usage. Sustainability, another major concern of the twenty-first century university, must be accounted for as we exponentionally adopt more of these technologies in our research and teaching. Any environmental costs are largely obscured from AI users. How may we encourage students to think about the environmental costs of AI, which are altering the conditions on Earth they will live within in the coming decades? Where does the destruction of our planet factor in, in the push towards AI ‘excellence’?
Care
Youth psychologists are now considering the impacts of AI on students’ mental health, socialability, critical thinking, writing skills, and other aspects of daily student life. What do students lose when students treat an LLM like a therapist or best friend? Who reminds students their voices and opinions are precious, when their first instinct may be to offload written work to ChatGPT? How does AI affect the teachers’ psychological experience, many of whom never imagined teaching in such ways when they first trained?
In tertiary education, it is imperative we ask ourselves: just because we can use AI, does it mean we should encourage it? Do we thoroughly understand AI’s ramifications? This talk invites audiences to review not only what AI can do, but also question whether AI is always ethical for the pursuit of our teaching and learning goals.
Presenter(s) / Author(s)
