AI Ethical Reflections

Description

Each of our AI Ethical Reflection Worksheets describes an ethically gray scenario of someone using AI as a student, as a professional, or in their personal lives. The worksheet then asks students to answer four questions that guide them to a carefully reasoned decision concerning the moral acceptability of using AI as described in the scenario.

The ethical questions on the worksheets are inspired by four distinct approaches in philosophical ethics: consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, and care ethics. Neither instructors nor students need familiarity with these approaches to use our worksheets successfully.

Guidance

We encourage you to adopt a "philosophical" attitude when using these worksheets with your students. The goal is not to tell students whether the situation in the scenario is ethical or not. Nor is the primary goal to decide whether a syllabus policy or professional code of ethics has been violated, though this may figure into students' ethical reflections. The goal is to have students discuss in groups the ethical nuances of the scenario.

In our limited testing so far, we have found that students typically want to say that a scenario is both ethical and unethical. The key follow-up questions are:

1. Why?

2. What would we change so it is a clear example of an ethical use of AI?

3. What would we modify so it is a clear example of an unethical use of AI?

The AI Ethical ReflectionWorksheets

The scenarios in these worksheets cover disciplines in the following very broad areas: Architecture, Agriculture, Business, Engineering, Humanities and Creative Arts, Science, and Mathematics. They are published here as MS-Word .docx files under a Creative Commons License BY-NC-SA 4.0. You are welcome to modify them and share them with attribution. The scenarios themselves were inspired by outputs from an LLM but were edited, and often re-written, by our team.

If you have any questions or feedback about our worksheets, please contact us.

Student Scenarios

Professional Scenarios

Personal Scenarios