Ethics and Artificial Intelligence – The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence,” by Oren Etzioni (Op-Ed, Sept. 2):

Last year, my lab at Georgia Tech created Jill Watson, an A.I.-powered virtual teaching assistant designed to help answer students’ questions in the discussion forum of an online class on artificial intelligence. To assess Jill’s performance properly, we chose not to reveal her identity until the conclusion of the class.

Mr. Etzioni characterized our experiment as an effort to “fool” students. The point of the experiment was to determine whether an A.I. agent could be indistinguishable from human teaching assistants on a limited task in a constrained environment. (It was.)

When we did tell the students about Jill, their response was uniformly positive.

We were aware of the ethical issues and obtained approval of Georgia Tech’s Institutional Review Board, the office responsible for making sure that experiments with human subjects meet high ethical standards.

We believe that experiments like Jill are critical for deeply understanding the emerging ethics of artificial intelligence.

ASHOK GOEL, ATLANTA

The writer is a professor of computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology.

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