Report: AI for students may still promote DEI ideology

(The Center Square) – Diversity, equity and inclusion principles will still be promoted to American students through AI that’s been infused with the identity-based ideology, despite educational institutions’ recent backtracking, a new report from Defending Education warns.

Investigative reporter for Defending Education Casey Ryan told The Center Square: “In an attempt to save face last year, many universities pretended to backtrack in public-facing actions and statements from the DEI priorities and programs that they had supported and funded for years at the taxpayer expense.

“We can now see that, in many cases, it was mostly a thinly veiled attempt to protect their own funding from the federal government,” Ryan said. “Our new report exposes how institutions of higher learning didn’t really retreat from DEI; they just found a new way to promote it under the radar.”

Ryan said universities’ “goal is to encourage tech corporations through research and training to integrate DEI into AI tools before schools adopt them.”

“If DEI in AI is institutionalized, then this problem becomes much more difficult to fix in the future,” Ryan warned.

Ryan further said “if DEI is integrated into the AI tools that schools will soon adopt for their classrooms, far-left ideologies such as gender ideology and anti-racism become the new norm for students.”

“Students will be trained and taught to use AI for their research and projects within the next few years in schools,” Ryan said. “Teachers will use AI tools to create lesson plans and to grade papers.

“We cannot allow the future of education to be embedded with DEI, but that is exactly what will happen if these universities succeed,” Ryan said.

Some of the institutions Defending Education says are shaping minds with identity-based ideologies through AI include MIT, UC Berkeley, Columbia University, Virginia State University, and Morgan State University.

For instance, Defending Education’s report says that the stated mission of MIT’s initiative, “Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education” is “to rethink and invent a more positive and inclusive future of education and learning in the era of AI.”

This initiative’s work “informs, engages, and empowers millions of teachers, learners, innovators, researchers, and leaders worldwide,” according to MIT.

Further, the report notes that UC Berkeley’s program the UC Berkeley AI Research Lab’s (BAIR) mission is “to drive critical research, innovation and collaboration towards responsible and equitable AI.”

BAIR additionally “accuses ChatGPT of exacerbating discrimination for using ‘Standard American English’ as the default,” Defending Education’s report said.

Defending Education stated that a Columbia University group – the Social Intervention Group (SIG) – has a project called the Human-Centered Benchmarks for Evaluating AI Chatbot Equity.

In explanation of this project, Columbia’s SIG said: “To ensure AI chatbots are safe and effective for LGBTQ+ communities, SIG researchers developed a human-driven benchmarking tool to evaluate outputs from popular chatbots.”

Meanwhile, Virginia State University possesses a “Center for Responsible AI” initiative “that the school claims was created to ‘ensure AI is woven thoughtfully and equitably into the fabric of education, research and public life at Virginia State University and throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia,’” Defending Education’s report said.

Morgan State University’s Center for Equitable Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems has “a mission to ‘facilitate the development, deployment, and verification of socially responsible and equitable artificial intelligence systems,’” Defending Education’s report said.

Defending Education said these schools are not alone in “promoting the adoption of DEI in AI tools” but represent notable colleges and universities. None of the schools have yet responded to The Center Square’s request for comment.