Supporting Teens’ Everyday Ethical Thinking About GenAI

Abstract

Teens are increasingly interacting with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), an engagement that introduces distinct ethical considerations into their daily digital lives. Prior scholarship in the fields of Child Computer Interaction (CCI) and Computer Science Education (CSEd) offers frameworks to support these ethical decisions by scaffolding young people's thinking about design ethics, which involves considering the ethical implications of designing technologies in a specific way. Fewer pedagogical approaches exist to guide teens in their thinking about everyday ethics, or the ethical aspects of using GenAI that are intermingled in everyday life. Equipping youth to navigate the specific ethical uncertainties of daily life with GenAI is essential in a world increasingly shaped by these integrations. To that end, this dissertation investigates how to build environments that allow for teens’ everyday ethical thinking, seeking to support youth as they move toward more intentional and thoughtful engagement with GenAI. My work makes several contributions to the CCI and CSEd fields through a series of qualitative studies. The first contribution surfaces new empirical evidence documenting how teens are currently using and reasoning about GenAI technologies in their daily lives, with a particular focus on teens' reasoning about the ethical dimensions of GenAI. Additionally, I examine the broad range of youth's present concerns about using GenAI, and demonstrate that they are prepared and eager to move beyond discussions of GenAI and cheating. I then contribute an empirical account of teens' expressions of ethical sensemaking and everyday ethical thinking when scaffolded with two different pedagogical approaches. I describe these approaches through two qualitative investigations. The second study in this dissertation recounts a pedagogical intervention that blends insights from both teaching philosophy and computing education, and documents the variety of ways adolescents expressed ethical thinking alongside potential opportunities for doing so. The last study in this dissertation then proposes a novel pedagogical approach for eliciting and supporting teens' everyday ethical thinking about GenAI tools called FaCES. The study describes the implementation of the FaCES principles in a series of workshops with teens, and shows the everyday ethical thinking processes teens articulated as they engaged with the framework. Taken together, these studies argue for the importance of designing pedagogical interventions to support teens' everyday ethical thinking, and provide a foundation for future work that aims to empower young people to meaningfully engage in everyday ethical thinking about GenAI and other emerging technologies.