About
The Ethics, Values, Information, and Law (EVIL) reading group pursues scholarship in the intersections of ethics, law, and data and information technologies. The EVIL Reading group meets every three weeks (roughly), Fridays, online, and is hosted in collaboration with the iSchool and ML+X. The group is managed by Mariah A. Knowles.
Meetings
EVIL Reading Group
The EVIL Reading Group meets every three weeks (roughly), Fridays, online.
To join, complete this registration form to be added to our Slack and Google Group.
All members agree to abide by the Carpentries Code of Conduct.
Upcoming Meetings
Meeting details will be announced on Slack, the UW Events Calendar, and email (via Google Groups).
The schedule for Spring '25 is:
- 24 Jan 2025—Practical and ethical challenges of large language models in education: A systematic scoping review
- 14 Feb 2025—A review of green artificial intelligence: Towards a more sustainable future
- 7 Mar 2025—The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers
- 4 Apr 2025—Large language models display human-like social desirability biases in Big Five personality surveys
- 25 Apr 2025—ICE and IRS reach agreement to share taxpayer information of suspected undocumented immigrants, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos v. Bessent, and Overview of the Privacy Act: 2020 Edition
Past Meetings
The reading schedule for Fall '24 was:
- 30 Aug 2024—"Use of Artificial Intelligence meeting assistant tools" memo (emailed as a PDF) and Baker v. CVS Health Corporation
- 20 Sep 2024—Jones's "Work without the Worker," Chapter 3, "Humans-as-a-Service" (emailed as a PDF)
- 11 Oct 2024—AI Policy, Compliance & Regulation Newsletter, Edition #131
- 8 Nov 2024—Are Algorithmic Decisions Legitimate? The Effect of Process and Outcomes on Perceptions of Legitimacy of AI Decisions
- 22 Nov 2024—Not medically necessary: Inside the company helping America’s biggest health insurers deny coverage for care
- 13 Dec 2024—A Mulching Proposal
The reading schedule for Summer '24 was:
- 7 Jun 2024—Algorithmic Realism: Expanding the Boundaries of Algorithmic Thought
- 28 Jun 2024—Ethics and discrimination in artificial intelligence-enabled recruitment practices
- 26 Jul 2024—Delving into ChatGPT usage in academic writing through excess vocabulary
- 16 Aug 2024—Connecting the dots in trustworthy Artificial Intelligence: From AI principles, ethics, and key requirements to responsible AI systems and regulation
The reading schedule for Spring '24 was:
- 26 Jan 2024—State v. Pickett, intro through section 2 (pages 3–26). Supplemental reading: No Secret Evidence in Our Courts, Corey Pickett Case Puts New Jersey Courts and TrueAllele Head-to-Head, and Frye Standard
- 16 Feb 2024—Large image datasets: A pyrrhic win for computer vision? and Tiny Images's response
- 8 Mar 2024—New tools help artists fight AI by directly disrupting the systems and Glaze: Protecting Artists from Style Mimicry by Text-to-Image Models
- 29 Mar 2024—Rage against the machine? Framing societal threat and efficacy in YouTube videos about artificial intelligence
- 19 Apr 2024—Executive Order Restricts Foreign Access to U.S. Data, Citing National Security Risks
- 10 May 2024—Can philosophy help us get a grip on the consequences of AI?
The reading schedule for Fall '23 was:
- 18 Aug 2023—Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement
- 8 Sep 2023—10 Ways EU Copyright is Different from the US and Goldsmith and Wu's Who Controls the Internet?
- 29 Sep 2023—Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI
- 20 Oct 2023—The Grey Hoodie Project: Big Tobacco, Big Tech, and the Threat on Academic Integrity
- 10 Nov 2023—Dislocated accountabilities in the “AI supply chain”
- 1 Dec 2023—Public AI Training Datasets Are Rife With Licensing Errors
The reading schedule for Summer '22 was:
- 1 Jun 2022—Zuboff's Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- 15 Jun 2022—Zuboff's Age of Surveillance Capitalism (cont.)
- 29 Jun 2022—A Talk to Teachers
- 10 Aug 2022—Pasco
- 24 Aug 2022—Pasco (cont.)
The reading schedule for Spring '22 was:
- 26 Jan 2022—Inaugural Meeting, Introductions
- 9 Feb 2022—Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine
- 23 Feb 2022—Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's We Know All About You
- 9 Mar 2022—The secret bias hidden in mortgage-approval algorithms
- 23 Mar 2022—Rubel, Castro, and Pham's Algorithms and Autonomy
- 6 Apr 2022—Students Speak to Ethical Issues & Why Computing Belongs Within the Social Sciences
- 20 Apr 2022—Mark Coeckelbergh's The Political Philosophy of AI
- 4 May 2022—Tarleton Gillespie's Custodians of the Internet
- 18 May 2022—AI4Society episode 10
Useful Resources
The following are good starting points for finding cases, news, and articles, related to AI ethics:
- Recent Propublica "Algorithm" Articles
- Verge's "The greatest tech books of all time"
- GWU's "AI Litigation Database"
- Web Archive of the old "Explore AI Ethics" index
- Luiza Jarovsky's AI Book Club
- Mariah's list of AI Memoirs at UW Libraries
- JDSupra's AI law blog
- Daily Nous AI posts
- AI Incident Database
- PhilPapers Ethics of AI category
- ACM FAccT Links
- AI--Law, AI--Philosophy, and AI--Social Aspects library subjects
- US Newsstream search for AI and computing
Courses
Related courses taught at the iSchool
- LIS 202—Information Divides & Differences in a Multicultural Society
- LIS 461—Data and Algoritms: Information and Policy
- LIS 500—Code and Power
- LIS 601—Information: Perspectives and Contexts
- LIS 644—Digital Tools, Trends, and Debates
- LIS 661—Information Ethics and Policy