Ethics of AI — Bias, Deepfakes, and Responsibility

An AI might decide which video you see next, but what if it also helped decide who gets into a special school program? AI is making big decisions that affect you, but it's not always fair. The problem isn't that the AI is 'evil' — it's that it learns from a biased world. And that's something we need to talk about.

Artificial intelligence learns from the information we give it. If that information is biased, the AI becomes biased too. It's not a bug; it's a reflection of our own world's problems.Biased by Design: Imagine an AI that helps pick students for a gifted program. If it's trained on old data from a time when certain groups were excluded, the AI will learn to keep excluding them. It’s not thinking; it’s just repeating a pattern it learned from biased human history.Deepfakes and Fake News: A deepfake is an AI-generated video or audio clip that looks and sounds real but is completely fake. It can make it seem like a person said something they never did. This means you can't always trust what you see online.Who's Responsible?: If an AI makes a mistake that hurts someone, who is at fault? The pro...

Nia was scrolling through her feed when she saw it: a video of her favorite basketball player saying something terrible. Her friends were already sharing it in their group chat, and her first instinct was to repost it immediately. But she paused. Something felt off. She remembered learning about deepfakes — videos that look real but are totally fake. Instead of sharing, she opened a search engine and typed the athlete's name and 'controversy.' The top results were all news articles explaining the video was a known AI-generated fake. Nia deleted the video from her chat. She realized that seeing something with her own eyes was no longer enough proof.