As is often the case with my colleagues, I was most disheartened by the responses of the 20-odd faculty in the room with me. That is to say, there was no response. Nobody asked the glaring questions. There were perhaps three softball questions and one meandering question whose point I don't think anyone followed.
There was exactly one slide on #ethics. It said "Ethical AI." It had some bullet points about helping students not cheat (spoiler: most of it is to encourage AI use and stop thinking of it as "cheating"). Nothing about the (to me) much larger ethical issues.
Toward the end of the talk I asked a question (which was kind of long): I listed, in 30 seconds or so, some of the evidence for the extreme harm the wholesale adoption of AI is causing to the environment, to wealth concentration, democratic processes, political stability, copyright and IP ethics, etc. I asked if he thought AI should come with a price tag reflecting the currently-externalized costs. Of course he said that wasn't realistic. No surprises.
The surprise is that nobody else said jack shit about any of this before, during, or after my comment. This is in keeping with other conversations I've had with fellow faculty: 95% of them seem to have immediately flipped to "go along to get along" and "ignore the weirdo saying unpleasant things."
My partner said she was recently in a state government workers' webinar with dozens of attendees about similar topics. One person asked a question very similar to mine: how do you balance the benefits of AI with its clear, extreme harms? The presenter apparently completely ignored the question and went on as if nobody had spoken.
