AI education matters

I always say to my students "you are going to be the future data science leaders of the world". Wherever they end up, I hope they apply critical (Cotter, 2020; Dasgupta & Hill, 2020) and human-centered (Xu, 2019) thinking to the AI decisions they make. As AI algorithms become ever more omnipresent in our lives - from newsfeed organization to product recommendations and beyond - it is our responsibility as educators to equip our students with the necessary tools to interrogate the impacts of AI technology. Luckily, there has been a large push for the integration of ethics into AI curricula. Whether this is in Model AI assignments (Furey & Martin, 2019) or entire conferences (such as FAccT), there is a demand for integrated and critical algorithmic literacies both in the classroom and outside of it. As a social media researcher and AI educator, my work regularly contends with two pillars: Joy and Justice. In this article I intend to outline ways of integrating both play and critical interrogation into AI education, with examples from AI education scholarship (Druga, Vu, Likhith, & Qiu, 2019; Ko et al., 2020) as well as a light experience report highlighting student work. My students join me on this article as they are the main inspiration for innovative joy and justice practices!