Redesigning an AI bill of rights with/for young people: Principles for exploring AI ethics with middle and high school students

“AI ethics” has become a popular term for signaling concerns with the development and application of artificial intelligence, and a hot-button issue in both academic and public discourse. The current work tends to center adult-oriented, adult-generated, and issues-based conceptions of ethics. This paper reports on an alternative model for “doing ethics” via co-design with young people, highlighting the need for students to engage in AI ethics work, especially as AI is increasingly used in their education and social lives. In particular, we focus on developing a rights-based approach, using the White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights as a starting point for redesigning core AI ethics principles and their conveyance to be accessible and relevant to young people, in collaboration with young people. In this manuscript, we describe our empirical work in a series of three studies on AI ethics teaching and learning with middle and high school students, which culminated in redesigning pieces of the AI Bill of Rights. We present lessons learned, implications for responsible AI in education from student perspectives, and conclude with our suggested principles for integrating student insight and perspectives into the ethics frameworks that guide AI applications.