AI Is Being Used to Ban Books From School Libraries; Gizmodo, August 15, 2023

 Mack DeGeurin, Gizmodo; AI Is Being Used to Ban Books From School Libraries

"You can add regressive academic censorship to the list of unintended use cases for ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence models. In Iowa, a school district reportedly deployed AI software to identify and remove 19 books in order to comply with legislation prohibiting titles with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” from school libraries. The law has already led to the hasty removal of crucial 20th-century literary classics like Maya Angelou’s Where the Caged Bird Sings, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, among others. AI models scanned libraries’ books for sexual content and flagged them to administrators.

The Mason City Community School District, according to local paper, The Gazette, reportedly used an unnamed AI software to scan school library books ahead of the 2023-2024 academic year. Board members reportedly compiled a list of “commonly challenged books” and used the AI system to scan the list for supposed sexual content. Those flagged books were then removed from 7-12th grade school library collections and “stored in the Administrative Center.” These 19 books were removed following the AI analysis, according to The Gazette."

Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met; The New York Times, May 27, 2022

Kashmir Hill, The New York Times; Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met

An unsettling glimpse at the digitization of education.

"The most serious flaw with these systems may be a human one: educators who overreact when artificially intelligent software raises an alert.

“Schools seem to be treating it as the word of God,” Mr. Quintin said. “If the computer says you’re cheating, you must be cheating.”"

SAP Becomes First European Tech Company to Create Ethics Advisory Panel for Artificial Intelligence; PR Newswire via Yahoo, September 18, 2018

PR Newswire via Yahoo; SAP Becomes First European Tech Company to Create Ethics Advisory Panel for Artificial Intelligence

""SAP considers the ethical use of data a core value," said Luka Mucic, Chief Financial Officer and Member of the Executive Board, SAP. "We want to create software that enables the intelligent enterprise and actually improves people's lives. Such principles will serve as the basis to make AI a technology that augments human talent."

SAP guiding principles reflect the company's commitment to comply with the highest ethical standards."

AI Meets Ethics: Can the Resulting Problems Be Addressed?; Legaltech News, Law.com, August 22, 2018

Rhys Dipshan, Legaltech News, Law.com;

AI Meets Ethics: Can the Resulting Problems Be Addressed?

 

"For Johannes Stiehler, CTO at e-discovery and analytics company Ayfie, the ethical concerns with AI mostly relate back to the issue of accountability. “The question of culpability is going to be key to these ethical discussions, in law as much as in medicine,” he said...

A 2016 investigation by ProPublica found that COMPAS showed bias against African-American prisoners.

Katz, however, noted that bias in the criminal justice program would exist with or without AI.  “There are plenty of complaints of biases of judges and police,” he said, adding that it’s interesting that there is so much focus on fixing AI, but little focus on addressing human biases."