Since ChatGPT gained national prominence in November 2022, the ethical facets of AI use have become more and more complicated. Amaranth helps humanists to navigate the fast-changing dynamics of the debates over ethical uses of generative AI products.
The AI Steering Committee at UNM has drafted a Statement of Values,Ethics, and Principles for Artificial Intelligence at UNM. This document provides an excellent framework for an ethical approach to use of generative AI tools for teaching and research. At Amaranth, we offer advice on how to match the goals of documents like this one to specific situations in the classroom and in the archive.
An ethical use of AI will often hue closely to the purpose of the specific project. For a research paper submitted as a course requirement, the instructor will provide guidance on what parts are AI-friendly and what aspects of the research process must be done without AI. Ethical use, in this case, means following the guidelines from the course instructor.
Scholars considering the use of AI when preparing a piece for publication face a different set of ethical questions. The debates over AI disclosure continue and rules in place today might not apply a year from now. Princeton University Library maintains a helpful guide on disclosure policies from several large academic publishers.
Amaranth consults with researchers about finding the best ethical and productive way to leverage AI for specific humanities projects. Email us at amaranth@unm.edu to book a consultation.
At this time, an advanced use of generative AI using local LLM requires much more than 32GB of RAM on a device, and that comes at a high price point. If you want to use AI to crunch big data or produce the most sophisticated analyses, then you will probably need to use a corporate frontier model such as Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Google’s Gemini. An ethical use of these applications requires understanding some background about how they were made.
All of the frontier AI models were created by a process of large-scale data scraping which could have violated intellectual property law and copyright law. Litigation, with The New York Times as lead plaintiff, is currently pending. In addition, the models in their initial stages require human beings to censor anti-social output deemed unfit for public release. The frontier AI companies employed low-wage labor for this work, known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. Similar to the content moderation labor used by social media companies, there are concerns about how moderation work for AI caused psychological trauma. The construction of data centers to run the frontier AI models, in the past and in regard to future plans, has been criticized on environmental justice grounds.
Keeping these ethical considerations in mind implies that care should be taken when deciding when to use the frontier models. For some this means using frontier AI models sparingly, and they will foucs on using local LLM to learn about AI. For others this means using frontier AI models while searching for ways to choose and promote companies that address ethical considerations with something more than lip service.