As this special issue elaborates at some length, today’s AI entails a host of ethical problems, including the nonconsensual “scraping” of human creative work for private gain, amplification of stereotypes and bias, perpetuation of surveillance, exploitation of human crowdworkers, exacerbation of environmental harms, and unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of a few corporations that have already proven themselves poor stewards of the public interest.5 The reality of increasing harm in the deployment of these systems has led the EU to place “AI systems intended to be used for the purposes of assessing students” and “participants in tests commonly required for admission to educational institutions” in their highest category of risk, alongside those used for law enforcement and administration of justice (EU AI 2023, n.p.). Teaching critical AI literacy (Bali 2023) includes making this larger context visible to students. Advancing such literacy does not preclude the possibility of envisioning AI tools that work.
