The Action Alliance on Basic Education yesterday urged the Ministry of Education to establish ethical norms for teaching artificial intelligence (AI), as the government pushes to incorporate the emerging technology across the education system.
The ministry should prioritize AI education on fighting discrimination and crime, as well as improving learning motivation, rather than focusing solely on technological innovations, the group said in a news release.
The ministry has been implementing AI education at all education levels, including the establishment of the Taiwan Artificial Intelligence College Alliance, which integrates resources from 25 universities to offer cross-school enrollment for AI courses.
Photo: Reuters
It also plans to launch diverse elective AI courses for high schools, and AI competition for junior-high and elementary-school students.
However, ethical disputes arising from AI applications remain and teaching AI without establishing ethical norms would expose students to unconscious biases, privacy risks and potential crimes, alliance chairman Wang Han-yang (王瀚陽) said.
Citing a UNESCO statement published in 2021, Wang said that AI has brought unprecedented challenges, including “increased gender and ethnic bias, significant threats to privacy, dignity and agency, dangers of mass surveillance and increased use of unreliable AI technologies in law enforcement,” but there were “no universal standards to provide an answer to these issues.”
To address these risks, UNESCO in November 2021 announced the “Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.”
It was the first global agreement adopted by the 193 member states to tackle the ethical issues of AI, Wang said, adding that ChatGPT has been banned by the Italian government since a personal data leak in March last year.
Holding AI competitions without proper guidance and could foster unhealthy competition, where students do whatever it takes to win at the expense of ethics or commit a crime, he said.
For example, a Taiwanese influencer abused the use of AI technology by making deepfake porn in violation of human dignity, he said.
The AI learning gap between urban and rural areas lies more in the learning motivation of students than in an unequal division of resources, as education is a job about people, Wang added.
Educators should think about how to motivate children to learn by interacting with them instead of simply providing digital resources, Wang said, advocating for a shift of mindset from “resource-based” to “motivation-oriented” AI education.
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