ID: 34027
Public debate continues to rage over AI policy - the economic, technical, and legal regulation of AI tool creation and use. These debates, however, reduce the interests down to a balancing of the interest and demands of the content industry with the interests and demands of the technology industry. Neither of those interests align particularly closely with the interests of users, and of public interest institutions including libraries, educational institutions, and the populations they serve.
The members of the panel will discuss what issues define the public interest as distinct from both of these corporate interests - working from the experience of the open education community as both committed to the public interest and engaged with new technologies.
We will cover interests including:
- Accessibility, universal design, and student agency - including the importance of users control and tool choice
- Transparency and due process - focusing on the importance of disclosure when AI tools are used and a process for challenging AI determinations when they are made without meaningful review
- Student surveillance, learning, and open pedagogy - preserving space for experimentation and learning
- Interoperability and portability - pushing back on platformization as a tool for extractive business models and content silos
Against these concerns we will start with a discussion of choices at an instructor or an institutional level, but will also focus on building a public agenda for policy debates and lawmaking processes to enunciate the interests that are not currently well represented in the debate.
We will engage with audience members to identify decision points in the selection, implementation, and use of AI in different teaching and learning contexts and to map the interests of users in specific cases. This session will build on previous work, including the “Policy Priorities for Generative AI and Open Education: A Report for the DOERS Community” as well as previous workshops within the open education community over the past four years.
We hope this session will serve two parallel purposes:
- First we hope it prepares participants for discussions of AI implementation and policy that they are involved in at a classroom, department, institutional or system level.
- Second, we hope that active discussion, participation, and feedback from participants will shape our forward looking work on furthering the public interests in law and policy debates on AI regulation, licensing, and lawmaking.
These goals are urgent - as policy decisions are being made we need a clear case for the interests of users, not just a bargain struck between two competing corporate interests. Members of the open community provide a valuable public interest perspective into this debate.
