Schools throughout America are in the early stages of integrating artificial intelligence into classrooms. Within the next few years, AI will be used in everything from helping students perform research to assisting teachers create lesson plans. The next battle over classrooms will be whether these new AI tools should include DEI priorities.
Several prominent universities have already launched initiatives to ensure DEI is institutionalized into AI tools before schools ever have a chance to adopt them. In a new revealing report, Defending Education found that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Columbia University, and the University of California, Berkeley are all involved in this plan.
MIT openly has an initiative called “Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education” (RAISE) with the goal to “rethink and invent a more positive and inclusive future of education and learning in the era of AI.” Through this initiative, the university claims to promote “equitable AI education.”
RAISE explicitly offers “free, research-based AI curricula designed to help K-12 students understand, question, and create with artificial intelligence” where students are taught about so-called “algorithmic bias.” The phrase algorithmic bias is often used in association with the claim that AI programs are typically made by white and Asian men and are influenced by their perceived biases.
This is a brazen initiative from a university that eliminated its DEI office last year and even eliminated the role of vice president for equity and inclusion. For an institution that recently appeared to be reprioritizing meritocracy, either RAISE fell through the cracks or MIT never intended to change course in the first place.
Unfortunately, Columbia University is no better.
Columbia has a “Social Intervention Group” that is actively promoting an initiative to advance “research, education, and training at the intersection of artificial intelligence and social good.” The university says the group’s vision is to create a “world where AI is used responsibly, ethically, and inclusively to address complex health, environmental, and social issues.”
Like MIT, Columbia University made efforts last year to roll back DEI priorities. Despite pulling back on these programs and initiatives, the school’s AI program seems to be relatively untouched.
The University of California, Berkeley has a similar program in place called the “UC Berkeley AI Research Lab” (BAIR). The university claims that this program “conducts cutting-edge research and projects, while supporting an inclusive community of researchers across AI and social science disciplines.” This research includes topics such as “equity” and “environmental impacts.”
In a more detailed description of the program, the university says its mission is to strive toward creating “responsible and equitable AI.” One of the research projects from the BAIR team is titled “Linguistic Bias in Generative AI.” BAIR accuses ChatGPT of discriminating against people in this project for their race and ethnicity for using “Standard American English.”
The idea that using “Standard American English” is discriminatory in any manner is absurd. If the University of California, Berkeley is using tax dollars to determine that the English language is inherently racist, the school’s leadership needs to take a hard look in the mirror and reprioritize the education of their students. This is the equivalent of burning money.
Last year, many universities either rolled back or at least pretended to roll back their DEI programs, but their AI initiatives tell another story. These universities never turned away from promoting DEI. They just pulled back enough to avoid scrutiny and kept moving forward with their plans. Now those plans include reshaping the future of AI.
These universities intend to use taxpayer dollars to sway tech companies through research projects, training, and influence, integrating DEI priorities into their AI tools before schools can fully integrate them into students’ learning experiences.
This problem must be solved at the state and federal levels. Even private universities receive federal grants. Our elected officials have an opportunity to stop this effort in our nation’s universities before it becomes institutionalized and harder to fix later. Now is the time to ensure that AI will be used to benefit our students rather than serve as another tool for politicized indoctrination.
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Casey Ryan is a writer and investigative reporter at Defending Education.
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