This session is facilitated by Catalina Brennan-Gatica, William Fitzgerald, Brooke Teferra
About this session
Facilitators and student organizer(s) will share their experiences advocating for ethical AI frameworks on U.S. college campuses and elaborate on the impact of campus conversations at big tech companies. Following their 25 minute presentation, there will be break-out groups (or depending on the size of the audience just a conversation with the panelists and audience) to continue the conversation.We’ll be joined by a student who has been organizing on a U.S. college campus and raising questions about AI-use in tech to speak about their concerns with the use of certain AI and the role students can play in shaping and mobilizing against these technologies, given their leverage in the tech recruitment pipeline. They’ll present some ideas for organizing on campus, as well as a list of questions to ask of AI projects. We will also share framing of the present moment of tech/student organizing and a brief history of past organizing (i.e. when students during the Vietnam War mobilized against Dow Jones for supplying napalm). We’ll facilitate a workshop-style brainstorming of other ways students can engage and how the project can be scaled. This brainstorm session will shape a revised version of the toolkit/questions we present during the session.
Goals of this session
We’re hoping to explore lessons learned and the path forward as we build support for students participating in big tech recruitment on campuses in order to understand their own power in advocating for more ethical AI. We’ll provide a few actionable approaches that students on campus can take to ask questions of these companies while they’re being recruited and push for change, both from campus and once they’ve entered the workplace. This latter goal will come in the form of a toolkit with questions students/employees should ask about artificial intelligence and tactics they can take to shape any AI they find ethically questionable.