The Ethics of AI in Education

The advent of big data, and of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications that collect and consume such data, has led to fundamental questions about the ethics of AI designs and to efforts aimed to highlight and safeguard against any potential harms caused by the deployment of AI across diverse domains of applications. Typically, questions raised relate to the trustworthiness of AI as agent technologies that autonomously or semi-autonomously operate in human environments and that have the ability to alter human behaviour. Other questions concern the role that AI may play now and in the future in either resolving or amplifying pre-existing social biases and any resulting harms. Specifically, Ethical AI as an emergent area of AI research and policy, has been spurred by the revelations of AI applications (usually unintentionally) promoting and amplifying many of the discriminatory and oppressive practices, and assumptions that underpin pre-existing social and institutional systems, e.g., historical biases against non-dominant populations, against users characterised by some divergence from the so-called cognitive or physical'norm', or those who are socio-economically disadvantaged (Crawford, 2017a; Madaio et al., 2022; Porayska-Pomsta and Rajendran, 2019; Williamson, Eynon, Knox & Davis, in this volume). Numerous examples of AI bias are both well-documented and rehearsed throughout the emergent ethics of AI literature, in hundreds of policy reports about AI ethics and governance that have been published to date (c.f.