AI Toolkit: Libraries and Essays for Exploring the Technology and Ethics of AI
This provides an accessible educational resource for faculty and learners to incorporate AI topics, addressing a need for broader AI literacy, but it is incremental as it builds on existing tools and formats.
The authors developed AITK, an open-source toolkit with Python libraries and Jupyter notebooks, to help non-experts interact with AI tools, understand their functions and ethical implications, and pilot studies showed it is easy to navigate and effective for learning.
In this paper we describe the development and evaluation of AITK, the Artificial Intelligence Toolkit. This open-source project contains both Python libraries and computational essays (Jupyter notebooks) that together are designed to allow a diverse audience with little or no background in AI to interact with a variety of AI tools, exploring in more depth how they function, visualizing their outcomes, and gaining a better understanding of their ethical implications. These notebooks have been piloted at multiple institutions in a variety of humanities courses centered on the theme of responsible AI. In addition, we conducted usability testing of AITK. Our pilot studies and usability testing results indicate that AITK is easy to navigate and effective at helping users gain a better understanding of AI. Our goal, in this time of rapid innovations in AI, is for AITK to provide an accessible resource for faculty from any discipline looking to incorporate AI topics into their courses and for anyone eager to learn more about AI on their own.