The AI Incident Database as an Educational Tool to Raise Awareness of AI Harms: A Classroom Exploration of Efficacy, Limitations, & Future Improvements
This work addresses the need for effective AI ethics education tools to bridge the gap between technical skills and ethical awareness among students, though it is incremental in assessing an existing database.
The study evaluated the AI Incident Database (AIID) as an educational tool to raise awareness of AI harms, finding that it helped students better understand the magnitude and severity of these issues and instilled a sense of urgency for designing safe AI and strengthening governance.
Prior work has established the importance of integrating AI ethics topics into computer and data sciences curricula. We provide evidence suggesting that one of the critical objectives of AI Ethics education must be to raise awareness of AI harms. While there are various sources to learn about such harms, The AI Incident Database (AIID) is one of the few attempts at offering a relatively comprehensive database indexing prior instances of harms or near harms stemming from the deployment of AI technologies in the real world. This study assesses the effectiveness of AIID as an educational tool to raise awareness regarding the prevalence and severity of AI harms in socially high-stakes domains. We present findings obtained through a classroom study conducted at an R1 institution as part of a course focused on the societal and ethical considerations around AI and ML. Our qualitative findings characterize students' initial perceptions of core topics in AI ethics and their desire to close the educational gap between their technical skills and their ability to think systematically about ethical and societal aspects of their work. We find that interacting with the database helps students better understand the magnitude and severity of AI harms and instills in them a sense of urgency around (a) designing functional and safe AI and (b) strengthening governance and accountability mechanisms. Finally, we compile students' feedback about the tool and our class activity into actionable recommendations for the database development team and the broader community to improve awareness of AI harms in AI ethics education.