Ethical principles for artificial intelligence in K-12 education

Advances in Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) are providing teachers with a wealth of new tools and smart services to facilitate student learning. Meanwhile, growing public concern over the potentially harmful societal effects of AI has prompted the publication of a flurry of AI ethics guidelines and policy documents authored by national and international government agencies, academic consortia and industrial stakeholders. AI ethics policy guidance specific to children and K-12 education has lagged behind; this scene is swiftly changing. In this paper, we examine the ethical principles currently informing AI ethics policy development for children and K-12 education. To accomplish this, we located four recent and globally relevant Artificial Intelligence in K-12 Education (AIEdK-12) ethics guideline statements; we then performed a content analysis of these documents using eleven AI ethics principles identified by Jobin et al. (2019). We found that these AIEdK-12 ethics guidelines employed many of the core principles already employed in non-AIEdK-12 documents—Transparency; Justice and Fairness; Non-maleficence; Responsibility; Privacy; Beneficence; Freedom & Autonomy—and were sometimes adapted for children. We further identified four new ethical principles being employed that are unique to K-12 education, specifically: Pedagogical Appropriateness; Children's Rights; AI Literacy; and Teacher Well-being. Our analysis also calls for a decolonized “humanized posthuman” ethic able to address the intensifying human-AI collaborative environment in classrooms, and able to weigh the complex indications and contraindications for children's and youth's cognitive, social-emotional, physical, cultural and political development. © 2023 The Authors