Who Writes the Rights? Creating Posters for an AI Bill of Rights with Middle School Students

• In Event: Speculative Civics Learning Through Artistic Creation and Performance

Abstract

Although artificial intelligence (AI) has influenced our information landscape for some time (e.g., via Google searching and recommendation algorithms), it has become a topic of increasing interest and debate since the advent of publicly accessible generative models like ChatGPT. This wave of attention to AI in our lives, education included, has created a sense of urgency for developing ways to understand, govern, and teach about AI. Despite this interest and urgency, there remains little evidence that young people have been included in these discussions in meaningful ways, especially in the United States.
This indicates both great need and great potential for collaborative youth civic engagement around AI. We report here on one effort to do this in a STEM-learning program for middle and high school students, the fourth iteration of a project working with students to create art related to AI ethics. In previous iterations (see Authors, 2024), students “redesigned” an AI Bill of Rights, in short videos and posters, to be more accessible and relevant to young people, using the White House’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights (White House, 2022) as a starting point for re-interpretation, critique, and new ideas.
Our study is grounded in critical posthumanist literacy (Authors, 2024), which draws on critical (digital) literacy’s long-standing focus on civic participation (e.g., see Garcia et al, 2015). In a critical posthumanist literacy framing, one important goal of literacies practice--including production of multimodal texts--is to work toward “sociotechnical justice,” signaling that justice cannot be achieved without attending to both (and intertwining) social and technical factors.
In this analysis, we discuss a project where 64 7th and 8th grade students created posters relating to their ideas about an AI Bill of Rights in Spring 2024. Focal data include video/audio recording of the activity sessions, final posters, and pre- and post surveys from the unit. We used grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) to guide our coding, open and axial, of transcribed video data and open-ended survey response data, and textual analysis (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2015) to guide our analysis of 15 final product posters. We wondered, What did students identify as missing from existing frameworks? How did students make artistic choices to convey their messages? How did groups navigate the design process?
We highlight several themes from our analysis, including the role of collaboration in students’ creative production; invention versus re-interpretation of rights; and the interplay of technical, ethical, and artistic knowledge/know-how in student designs. We discuss the promise and limits of “redesigning for rights” when students imagine a reality that might differ from their own lived experiences. We conclude with our hopes for building on this work as not only an educational experience but as a touchstone for future advocacy. Though these activities certainly shaped students’ and teacher-researchers’ understanding of AI, and AI rights, we wonder how they can inform the law, public discourse, and the students’ broader lives, shifting from thinking of speculation as dreaming to speculation as precursor to civic action.

Authors

• Sarah Burriss, Vanderbilt University

• Zachary C. Conley, Vanderbilt University

• Desmond LeOtis Campbell, Vanderbilt University