All agree that it is imperative to educate students about the societal impacts of AI in all areas of AI application. Such training must conceptually equip students in all fields of study related to AI so that they can develop autonomous reflection on the ethical issues raised by these impacts. The competencies to be developed in higher education in AI ethics are numerous, both in the technical and professional fields and in the critical and social studies of AI.
The problem is that there are few resources to achieve a unified vision of what such training should impart. At present, higher education in AI ethics is deployed independently in each field of application, for example in human resource management, education, computer science, health, media studies, etc., which hinders the development of an appropriate understanding of the overall social context in which the ethical issues specific to each particular field of AI are deployed.
The École des médias de l'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the Cégep André-Laurendeau propose to correct this gap in the higher education of AI ethics by combining several areas of expertise necessary for such an undertaking. Media studies are indeed one of the particular fields of application of AI on which ethical reflection must focus, think for example of issues related to privacy, security, digital divide, gaming, commercial data traffic or marketing profiling. However, since the development of AI is intimately linked to the development of ICT and given the ubiquity of these technologies in our information societies, media studies must also be a central element of AI ethics in all areas of application, well beyond the specific issues of the media. Only an approach to AI ethics that takes the measure of the preponderant role of ICTs in today's societies, their economic impact, their sociological dimension, the political power relations that characterize them, their semiological importance and the philosophical questions they raise, can hope to provide a unified vision of the skills needed in higher education in AI ethics.
