2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Artificial intelligence’s (AI) widespread societal impact means that students of all disciplines will be working in roles adjacent to this new technology. As a result, they need to understand how to appropriately navigate and behave ethically in practice. The purpose of this paper is to introduce and detail a learning intervention intended to enhance the ethical behavior of future AI developers and engineers. The SIMDE conceptual framework was developed to offer a basis for understanding the pre-rational aspects of ethical decision-making as they are carried out into deliberate discourse in a social space amongst peers. To investigate the SIMDE framework, students were asked to solve a professional AI ethics problem in a dilemma-based seven-step learning activity. The qualitative results of this paper examine how constructs in the SIMDE conceptual framework were present in student responses, and what students learned from peer discourse that led them to either justify their gut-reaction decision or change their mind. We found that students are impacted by perspective-taking, they use reasoning to defend their position rather than seek and appraise truth, and moral self-reflection helps them learn more about themselves. Moreover, even when students learn new information and improve their reasoning, they are not inclined to change their minds from their initial intuitive judgment. This finding supports literature that suggests ‘reasoning’ can only go so far in the ethics curriculum if behavioral change is the goal. More interdisciplinary educational research is necessary to design an ethics curriculum that can appropriately prepare future AI professionals for the demands of industry.