Ethics of AI in Education: Towards a Community-Wide Framework

TLDR

AI in education aims to support learning, yet ethical intentions alone are insufficient, requiring attention to fairness, accountability, transparency, bias, autonomy, agency, inclusion, and the distinction between doing ethical things and doing things ethically, making the task far from trivial. The paper introduces ethical issues in AI in education, surveys 60 leading researchers on these questions, and summarizes the contributions of 17 respondents to highlight complex ethical concerns. The authors conducted a survey of 60 leading AIED researchers and summarized the contributions of 17 respondents to identify complex ethical issues. The study found that most AIED researchers lack training to address emerging ethical questions and that a multidisciplinary, guideline‑rich framework is essential for engaging with AI ethics in education.

Abstract

Abstract While Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research has at its core the desire to support student learning, experience from other AI domains suggest that such ethical intentions are not by themselves sufficient. There is also the need to consider explicitly issues such as fairness, accountability, transparency, bias, autonomy, agency, and inclusion. At a more general level, there is also a need to differentiate between doing ethical things and doing things ethically , to understand and to make pedagogical choices that are ethical, and to account for the ever-present possibility of unintended consequences. However, addressing these and related questions is far from trivial. As a first step towards addressing this critical gap, we invited 60 of the AIED community’s leading researchers to respond to a survey of questions about ethics and the application of AI in educational contexts. In this paper, we first introduce issues around the ethics of AI in education. Next, we summarise the contributions of the 17 respondents, and discuss the complex issues that they raised. Specific outcomes include the recognition that most AIED researchers are not trained to tackle the emerging ethical questions. A well-designed framework for engaging with ethics of AIED that combined a multidisciplinary approach and a set of robust guidelines seems vital in this context.