Artificial intelligence is transforming the education industry while offering new prospects for enhancing learning and teaching, improving assessment, customising instructions, and increasing equity and access. AI can also help students improve student engagement with courses while contributing to better outcomes. However, like other transformative technologies, it also introduces multiple ethical implications that educators, policymakers, and technologists must address.

Ethical issues with AI in education

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AI in education can raise multiple ethical issues. Here’s a look at a few of them:

Discrimination: AI systems may magnify or reflect prejudices and human biases, resulting in discriminatory or unjust outcomes for specific groups of instructors or students. For instance, AI systems can use inaccurate information that is incomplete or unrepresentative of learners’ diversity. They may also apply algorithms that are not accountable or transparent for their decisions.

Data protection: AI systems may store, process, collect, or share large amounts of sensitive and personal information from students, including biometrics, health information, academic performance, emotions, or preferences. This may compromise their privacy and data protection rights, particularly if the information is used for reasons other than teaching, such as commercialisation, spying, or profiling.

Explainability and transparency: AI systems may operate in complicated ways that are quite difficult to understand or question by stakeholders, teachers, or students. This lack of transparency can lead to mistrust, misuse, and misinterpretation.

Accountability: AI systems may raise concerns about who is accountable or responsible for their conception, creation, establishment, application, and influence on education.

Need to address ethical concerns

It is important to address the aforementioned ethical concerns in education for numerous reasons. Some of them are:

• They may have an impact on students’ and instructors’ dignity, as well as fundamental human rights.
• They may adversely impact the effectiveness of educational outcomes and processes.
• They may affect the inclusion of educational opportunities as well as benefits.

Strategies to address ethical concerns

• Overcoming the ethical implications of AI in education necessitates a flexible, proactive, and thoughtful approach. It involves establishing vigorous data privacy policies, diminishing algorithmic biases, enhancing AI system transparency, and balancing AI use with human judgement.
• For the sake of strengthening data privacy, educational institutions should execute strong data protection strategies and be unambiguous about their data practices. They should also make sure that parents and students are informed about the information being collected and used.
• In terms of stabilising AI with human judgement, it is important to consider AI as an important tool that augments rather than replaces human teachers.

The writer is a professor of operations management at FORE School of Management, New Delhi