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Opinion | Letter

Ethics and Artificial Intelligence

   SEPT. 14, 2017
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   Photo
   Credit Isaac Lawrence/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

   To the Editor:

   Re “How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence,” by Oren Etzioni (Op-Ed,
   Sept. 2):

   Last year, my lab at Georgia Tech created Jill Watson, an A.I.-powered
   virtual teaching assistant designed to help answer students’ questions
   in the discussion forum of an online class on artificial intelligence.
   To assess Jill’s performance properly, we chose not to reveal her
   identity until the conclusion of the class.

   Mr. Etzioni characterized our experiment as an effort to “fool”
   students. The point of the experiment was to determine whether an A.I.
   agent could be indistinguishable from human teaching assistants on a
   limited task in a constrained environment. (It was.)

   When we did tell the students about Jill, their response was uniformly
   positive.

   We were aware of the ethical issues and obtained approval of Georgia
   Tech’s Institutional Review Board, the office responsible for making
   sure that experiments with human subjects meet high ethical standards.

   We believe that experiments like Jill are critical for deeply
   understanding the emerging ethics of artificial intelligence.

   ASHOK GOEL, ATLANTA

   The writer is a professor of computer science at Georgia Institute of
   Technology.
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