Overview
AI systems inherit the biases of their training data, raise hard questions about privacy and copyright, and carry real environmental costs. This session examines those issues honestly, then runs live bias experiments and works through ethical case studies so you can form and defend your own positions.
The sharpest failures in this space are not rogue robots; they are ordinary systems that reduce a person to a score and then act on it. Automated hiring is the classic case, and playing through Survival of the Best Fit (a free ten-minute browser game about exactly that) makes the mechanism impossible to unsee.
Featured lab: Survival of the Best Fit
The centerpiece of this session is Survival of the Best Fit: you play a startup's hiring manager, automate your resume screening to keep up, and watch the model learn your own biases faster than you can catch them. Ten minutes in a browser, no account, and the module's core warning becomes something you did, not something you were told.
The debrief follows the game's own three-part resources page: Behind the Technology (where exactly did bias enter? what's inside the black box?), Fair Software (why better code alone can't fix it), and Steps Forward (what you would change at the company, and what policy should do). A closing detail worth telling the room: the game was built by four students as a class project before it won a Mozilla award. That is the bar this course's capstone points at.
Learning objectives
- Explain where bias in AI systems comes from and demonstrate it with prompts.
- Describe the privacy, copyright, and environmental issues generative AI raises.
- Analyze an ethical case study and defend a position on it.
- Apply a personal checklist for responsible AI use in school and work.
Session agenda
- 0:00 – 0:10Warm-up
Most convincing wrong answers from homework.
- 0:10 – 1:15Lecture: Bias, privacy, copyright, environment
How training data encodes bias; what happens to the data you paste in; the copyright fights; energy and water costs of AI.
- 1:15 – 1:25Break
- 1:25 – 2:05Featured lab: Survival of the Best Fit
Play the hiring-bias game, then debrief it in three rounds: where the bias entered, why better code alone can't fix it, and what you would change at the company.
- 2:05 – 3:00Lab: Bias experiments & case studies
Run structured bias experiments with prompts and compare results across the group; small-group discussion of ethical case studies with positions reported out.
- 3:00 – 3:10Wrap-up
Case-study verdicts; preview automation.
Materials
- Bias experiment worksheet and case-study packet (provided with the module).
- Survival of the Best Fit. Free, ten minutes, runs in a browser.
- Any AI assistant account from earlier modules.
Homework
Write a one-page discussion of one ethical case study: the issue, the stakeholders, your position, and what evidence would change your mind. Say plainly what would change it.
Detailed slides, lab worksheets, and demos for this module are in progress and will be posted here as they are written.