As generative AI becomes more integrated into education, it is essential to consider ethics, data privacy, and security to protect students and uphold institutional integrity. Ethical use of AI requires transparency, ensuring students understand how AI-generated content is created and its potential biases. Data privacy and security must be prioritized, especially when handling student information, to prevent unauthorized access and misuse. Additionally, institutions in Canada must comply with Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) regulations, ensuring that AI tools do not collect, store, or transmit personal data without proper safeguards. By proactively addressing these concerns, educators can harness AI’s potential while maintaining trust, compliance, and responsible innovation in the classroom.
New artificial intelligence (AI) tools and large language models (LLM) (e.g., ChatGPT, Google Bard, Bing Chat) interact in a conversational way and have many uses, but also present ethical challenges. Some key issues for educators related to AI-generated information are:
Maintaining student privacy is essential. Check technology signup requirements and terms of use. To maintain privacy (and meetFIPPArequirements) ensure tools do not collect student data (e.g., phone number, email address, age). Tools that do not meet privacy requirements must be voluntary and alternatives provided.
Generative AI companies collect personal information from the time that a user visits the site to their completion of using their services. At minimum, account data includes enough information to associate the individual with their account to login (this is usually name and email address). Sometimes setting up accounts includes providing additional demographic data that is either optional or mandatory. For services that require payment, the payment information directly associates the individual based on how they pay with the account and associated content making it harder to anonymize or alias the individual.
This work was adapted from Durham College for the Humber context, is licensed under a Creative Commons
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