{"id":14636,"date":"2026-05-07T12:23:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T12:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/07\/u-researchers-confront-urgent-ai-ethics-questions-the-university-of-utah\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T12:23:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T12:23:27","slug":"u-researchers-confront-urgent-ai-ethics-questions-the-university-of-utah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/07\/u-researchers-confront-urgent-ai-ethics-questions-the-university-of-utah\/","title":{"rendered":"U researchers confront urgent AI ethics questions – The University of Utah"},"content":{"rendered":"

As researchers across the University of Utah build, study, and use generative artificial intelligence (AI), they\u2019re uncovering high-stakes ethical questions that can\u2019t easily be solved by technologists or humanists alone.
Physician\u00a0<\/span>Ryan A. Metcalf<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>is exploring how AI might help doctors decide who truly needs a blood transfusion\u2014a common, lifesaving treatment that is also costly and often overused\u2014without sidelining clinical judgment at the bedside.
Economist\u00a0<\/span>Ellis Scharfenaker<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>is asking who will control AI\u2019s growing economic power as it reshapes work, with the potential to reduce drudgery and improve safety but also to intensify surveillance, deskilling, and inequality.
Political scientist\u00a0<\/span>Yuree Noh<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>(pictured above)<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>is using AI to analyze a massive global dataset on censorship and surveillance and wonders how to ensure a large language model\u2019s judgments hold up across countries\u2014including authoritarian ones\u2014without reinforcing biases that could shape policy. \u201cI’m thinking about aid allocation, for example,\u201d Noh said. \u201cWhat if these systematic biases are affecting those who have the least power to push back?\u201d
Researchers grappled with these questions and others at a first-of-its-kind\u00a0<\/span>AI and Ethics Workshop<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>held Friday, April 3, at the University Guest House. About 75 people attended the daylong interdisciplinary event, led by\u00a0<\/span>One-U Responsible AI Initiative faculty fellow<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>and philosophy professor\u00a0<\/span>C. Thi Nguyen<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>and his collaborator\u00a0<\/span>Jeff Phillips<\/a>, a computer science professor and member of the initiative\u2019s Faculty Engagement Committee.
\u201cAI is invading or driving everything, depending on your perspective,\u201d Phillips said. \u201cWe need to pause and think, \u2018Is it ok to do it that way?\u2019\u201d
As part of Nguyen\u2019s fellowship, he and Phillips are building the U\u2019s first AI and ethics course cross-listed in philosophy and computing. They used the event, in part, to start to build an interdisciplinary cohort around the subject.
Researchers across the U are examining problems at the intersection of AI and ethics, but many remain siloed in their own departments. \u201cThe workshop was centered around facilitating these conversations with people who would normally not get a chance to talk,\u201d Phillips said.
The event blocked off time for in-person brainstorming between people who build or study AI and humanities scholars, who are essential for understanding AI\u2019s influence on society.
\u201cEither side going it alone tends to miss vast swathes of what\u2019s really important,\u201d said Nguyen, who researches data ethics and has published two acclaimed books, including\u00a0<\/span>The Score<\/a>, released earlier this year. \u201cThe best work I’ve seen in research and in teaching has come from people working together.\u201d
The event featured four longer talks, but its hallmark was an open problem session: a dozen researchers pitched big questions to the room, then invited interested colleagues into breakout groups to work toward solutions. The event organizers borrowed the format from computer science conferences Phillips has attended.
\u201cThe warning: this is highly experimental,\u201d Nguyen said at the event. \u201cWe have not seen anyone try to do an open problem session in an interdisciplinary setting before, so we have no idea if this will work.\u201d
After the workshop, Scharfenaker said the sessions did a better job of fostering genuine interdisciplinary conversations than other campus events. He left with several concrete ideas for collaborations that wouldn\u2019t have emerged from his own department.
\u201cThe most valuable aspect, by far, was seeing what questions other departments are actually working on and where our concerns overlap,\u201d Scharfenaker said. \u201cThat kind of visibility is rare on a campus this size. It revealed not just shared interests but shared blind spots, which is arguably more useful.\u201d
Noh agreed. \u201cI got direct, substantive feedback on a problem I\u2019m actively stuck on,\u201d she said. One new idea was whether telling an AI model what kind of political system a country has would sharpen its analysis\u2014or skew it. Another entailed using donated chatbot data or secure platforms like Signal to hear from people who might stay silent in a standard survey.
More importantly, Noh said, was the chance to gather with people who care about similar issues. She pointed to conversations with peers whose research, like hers, spans countries and languages. \u201cThe open problem session really created collaboration opportunities.\u201d
Noh and Scharfenaker emphasized the importance of events like the workshop. AI, Scharfenaker said, has the potential to undermine public university values such as access, critical inquiry, and democratic knowledge production. The U\u2019s job is \u201cnot to ride the wave of AI enthusiasm but to subject that enthusiasm to the kind of critical scrutiny that only genuine academic inquiry can provide,\u201d he said.
Noh also said the event reinforced a broader point: the hardest problems in AI aren\u2019t necessarily technical\u2014they\u2019re often conceptual and political. \u201cWho decides what \u2018repression\u2019 means, for example? What counts as ground truth when even human coders disagree?\u201d she asked. \u201cI hope future iterations of this event allow us to explore things like this\u2014the messy, human side of the work.\u201d
Moving forward, Phillips and Nguyen hope to build a lasting cohort around AI and ethics and expect to hold one or two half-day workshops a semester.\u00a0<\/span>Sign up for initiative emails<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>to stay informed on future events.
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\u00a9 2026 THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH<\/p>\n

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As researchers across the University of Utah build, study, and use generative artificial intelligence (AI), they\u2019re uncovering high-stakes ethical questions that can\u2019t easily be solved by technologists or humanists alone.Physician\u00a0Ryan A. Metcalf\u00a0is exploring how AI might help doctors decide who truly needs a blood transfusion\u2014a common, lifesaving treatment that is also costly and often overused\u2014without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14636","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}