Consider ethics while designing AI major
From a little-known concept among researchers to generating summaries with every Google search, artificial intelligence’s accessibility has skyrocketed over the past decade. However, its innovation comes at a cost. Training ChatGPT-3 was estimated to generate 552 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, more than the emissions of 559 flights from London to New York. Artificial intelligence can also steal from artists and reproduce racist biases from its data sets.
These concerns are more relevant than ever with the new artificial intelligence major, which could be selected by students as soon as the fall of 2025.
Students studying artificial intelligence should be aware of these ethical issues, and we’re worried that these concerns won’t be kept in mind by a department that currently requires only one ethics class for its computer science major.
To be clear, we recognize the need for this new major. AI has the potential to better the world — or, at least, a whole lot of students’ academics. Many students will enter a workforce where the demand for AI and machine learning specialists is forecasted to grow by 80% in the next five years.
The AI major will be more ethics-minded and interdisciplinary than the computer science major, with required cognitive psychology and ethics classes to be developed with the philosophy department. However, while the AI department is still fleshing out the curriculum, we advocate for a focus on ethics, developing courses in consultation with humanities departments or even offering an AI ethics concentration within the major. A degree teaching students how to build neural networks is great, but a degree studying AI’s place in a responsible society would be best.
The curriculum of many AI majors available at other universities are similar to Rice’s model, requiring one ethics class and one cognitive psychology class from a list of approved options. However, we would urge the AI department to ensure these required ethics classes are actually about ethics; MIT, which offers an artificial intelligence and decision making major, allows students to fill their ethics requirement with classes such as Advances in Computer Vision that, based on their course description, are not principally focused on ethics.
Recognizing AI as a course of study also opens up the opportunity to implement AI classes for non-majors. AI writing isn’t always the best, with its propensity to overuse certain phrases and decrease authenticity. How about a FWIS that teaches students how to use AI responsibly and avoid its common pitfalls? Or a linguistics class that studies the features and limitations of large language models?
When the world changes, Rice must adapt. A strong emphasis on the ethics of AI will position AI majors to be not only attractive employees but also responsible citizens. The new AI degree is a step in the right direction, but with all new inventions, we feel that it should be an ethical one.
Editor’s Note: Thresher editorials are collectively written by the members of the Thresher’s editorial board. Current members include Riya Misra, Spring Chenjp, Maria Morkas, Sarah Knowlton, Sammy Baek, Shruti Patankar, Juliana Lightsey, Arman Saxena and Kathleen Ortiz.
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