President Biden’s AI Executive Order: What Higher Education Needs to Know
In case you did not see this, On October 30, 2023, President Biden issued an Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. AI is already being used in a variety of ways on college campuses, from teaching and learning to research and administration. I am pretty sure that the executive order will have implications for us in higher ed.
One of the key goals of the executive order is to promote the responsible and ethical development and use of AI. This is important for us because these systems are as good as their training datasets and therefore likely to amplify biases and inequalities in the training datasets and the corpus of information they continue to learn from. For example, if an AI system is used to grade student essays, it could be biased against certain groups of students, such as those from underrepresented minority backgrounds.