💬 Whose ethics? Whose AI?

Helen Beetham follows up here keynote to the Association for Learning Technologies (ALT) winter summit on AI and ethics, unpacking a few questions that were raised. The two points that stood out to me were that rather than teaching ‘prompt engineering‘, we need to update search skills in a part-AI world:

What I think we probably should do, working with our colleagues in libraries and study skills centres, is to update our support for search skills. Help students to understand what the algorithms are hiding as well as what they are revealing, how to search when you know what you are looking for as well as when you don’t, the business models as well as the algorithms of search, and how search online is being systematically degraded both by commercial interests and by these new synthetic capabilities. We may conclude that students are better off learning how to use the walled gardens of content that academic libraries and subscriptions provide – which ties in with my arguments about building our own ecosystems. That will also equip them for search ‘in the wild’.

Source: Whose Ethics? Whose AI? by Helen Beetham

And that rather than inviting cynicism regarding the use of various tools to write essays, opportunities need to be found to talk to students about what agency they have to shape their own futures.

ᔥ “Stephen Downes” in Downes.ca ~ Stephen’s Web ~ Whose ethics? Whose AI? (01/08/2024 12:13:15)