🤗 Join In

Join our mailing list to get meeting reminders

Everyone is welcome to get involved in Data Ethics Club, as much or as little as you’d like to! We would love to hear your point of view at our discussion groups, to have your support in organising or running a meeting, or to add your contributions to our reading list.

You don’t need to be a data ethicist (we’re not!), or a data scientist - having a variety of different people is how we learn from each other. It’s a friendly and welcoming group and we often have new people drop by, so why not try it?

We meet every other week for one hour on Zoom (Wednesdays, 1pm, UK time) to talk about something from the reading list. Out upcoming meeting dates are available below. If you would like to get email reminders about the content and dates for the next meeting then click above to join our mailing list! You can also join the DEC Slack by clicking here.

Please read our Code of Conduct before attending.

Upcoming meetings

These are the meetings for the next academic term.
We will update the material and questions based on the previous weeks’ vote.

All meetings are held at 1pm UK time and last one hour. If you are in another timezone please use a time/date converter like this one to check your local time!

You can see the write ups of previous meetings here!

Summer Book Club

For our summer 2025 bookclub, we will be reading AI Snake Oil: What artificial intelligence can do, what it can’t and how to tell the difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor.

On their website you can read the first chapter online for free, see what each chapter is about and see the suggested exercises and discussion prompts by the authors to get an idea of the kinds of conversation we might be having.

There are 8 chapters and the exact schedule is below. We’ll be meeting 4-5pm UK time on Microsoft Teams, click here to join.

• 11th June: Chapter 1 - Introduction (34 pages)

• 18th June: Chapter 2 - How predictive AI goes wrong (24 pages)

• 2nd July: Chapter 3 - Why can’t AI predict the future? (39 pages)

• 16th July: Chapter 4 - The Long Road to Generative AI (51 pages)

• 23rd July: Chapter 5 - Is Advanced AI an Existential Threat? (27 pages)

• 6th August Chapter 6 - Why can’t AI fix social media? (48 pages)

• 13th August: Chapter 7 - Why do myths about AI persist? (31 pages)

• 20th August: Chapter 8 - Where do we go from here? (27 pages)

If you’d like to be forwarded calendar invites to the session then you can let us know via email or by commenting on the Slack thread.

Past Meetings

30th April - AI in Education Special

Material: UK announces AI funding for teachers: how this technology could change the profession

With additional optional reading: Pedagogy of the Depressed

Session will be introduced by Dr Lyndsay Grant, Lecturer in Education at the University of Bristol.

Discussion questions:

1. What are your experiences with using AI to teach (either yourself or others)?

2. AI is promised to help alleviate teachers’ unsustainable workload and thereby address a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention. What other responses to this problem might there be and why are they not being pursued?

3. Who is accountable for the quality of education and resources generated through the use of AI? Who is accountable for the safe and ethical use of AI in schools and are they equipped to take on this role?

You can see a record of what we have discussed previously here.

Date	Discussion Material	Summary
16.04.2025, 1pm	Understanding and supporting the mental health and professional quality of life of academic mental health researchers: results from a cross-sectional survey	Read the writeup
02.04.2025, 1pm	The Political Economy of Death in the Age of Information: A Critical Approach to the Digital Afterlife Industry	Read the writeup
19.03.2025, 1pm	Alphafold: The Most Useful Thing AI Has Ever Done	Read the writeup
05.03.2025, 1pm	International Women’s Day Special	Read the writeup
22.02.2025, 1pm	OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us	Read the writeup
05.02.2025, 1pm	“It’s Not Exactly Meant to Be Realistic”: Student Perspectives on the Role of Ethics In Computing Group Projects	Read the writeup
22.01.2025, 1pm	Data Ethics Club: New Years Resolutions Special	Read the writeup
18.12.2024, 1pm	Ask Me Anything! How ChatGPT Got Hyped Into Being	Read the writeup
04.12.2024, 1pm	Visuals of AI in the Military Domain: Beyond ‘Killer Robots’ and towards Better Images?	Read the writeup
20.11.2024, 1pm	A giant biotechnology company might be about to go bust. What will happen to the millions of people’s DNA it holds?	Read the writeup
06.11.2024, 1pm	Data Ethics Club: Creating a collaborative space to discuss data ethics	Read the writeup
23.10.2024, 1pm	Transparent communication of evidence does not undermine public trust in evidence	Read the writeup
09.10.2024, 1pm	Time to reality check the promises of machine learning-powered precision medicine	Read the writeup
25.09.2024, 1pm	ChatGPT is Bullsh*t	Read the writeup
Weekly in July/August 2024	Data Feminism Book Club	Read the writeup
04.06.2024, 11am	How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education	Read the writeup
22.05.2024, 1pm	The Myers-Briggs Test Has Been Debunked Time and Again. Why Do Companies Still Use It?	Read the writeup
08.05.2024, 1pm	Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology relies on hundreds of workers in India watching you shop	Read the writeup
24.04.2024, 1pm	Artificial Intelligence Act: MEPs adopt landmark law	Read the writeup
27.03.2024, 1pm	Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence	Read the writeup
13.03.2024, 1pm	Values in Generative AI (discussing Gemini and DignifAI)	Read the writeup
28.02.2024, 1pm	Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find	Read the writeup
14.02.2024, 1pm	Italian Supervisory Authority clamps down on Replika chatbot	Read the writeup
31.01.2024, 1pm	Duolingo cuts workers as it relies more on AI	Read the write up
17.01.2024, 1pm	New Years Data Ethics Resolutions	Read the write up
06.12.2023, 1pm	Anatomy of an AI-Powered Malicious Social Botnet	Read the write up
22.11.2023, 1pm	Implementation of an ethics checklist at Seattle Children’s Hospital	Read the write up
08.11.2023, 1pm	The Dimensions of Data Labor	Read the write up
25.10.2023, 1pm	How influencer ‘mumpreneur’ bloggers and ‘everyday’ mums frame presenting their children online	Read the write up
11.10.2023, 1pm	Privacy and Loyalty Card Data	Read the write up
27.09.2023, 1pm	Cancelled in support of UCU strikes	N/A
31.05.2023, 1pm	Classifying ‘toxic’ content online	Read the write up
05.06.2023, 2pm	JGI Data Week Special! Find out more here.	Read the write up
17.05.2023, 1pm	Designing Accountable Systems	Read the write up
03.05.2023, 1pm	Queer in AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI	Read the write up
19.04.2023, 1pm	Social Biases in NLP Models as Barriers for Persons with Disabilities	Read the write up
29.03.2023, 1pm	The Tech We Won’t Build	Read the write up
08.03.2023, 3pm	Limits and Possibilities for “Ethical AI” in Open Source: A Study of Deepfakes, plus a related short talk from David Widder	Read the write up
08.02.2023, 1pm	ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove	Read the write up
25.01.2023, 1pm	Data Ethics New Years Resolutions discussion!	Read the write up
14.12.2022, 1pm	Defective Altruism	Read the write up
16.11.2022, 1pm	The Ethics of AI Generated Art	Read the write up
30.11.2022, 1pm	Cancelled in support of the UCU strikes
02.11.2022, 1pm	The data was there – so why did it take coronavirus to wake us up to racial health inequalities?	Read the write up
19.10.2022, 1pm	Patient and public involvement to build trust in artificial intelligence: A framework, tools, and case studies	Read the write up
05.10.2022, 1pm	The Failures of Algorithmic Fairness	Read the write up
21.09.2022, 1pm	Hacking the cis-tem	Read the write up
16.06.2022, 1pm	Data Week Special - We watched a video by Virginia Eubanks (author of Automating Inequality)	Read the write up
01.06.2022, 1pm	Participatory data stewardship	Read the write up
18.05.2022, 1pm	Why Data Is Never Raw	Read the write up
04.05.2022, 1pm	Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of “Ethics” in Big Tech	Read the write up
06.04.2022, 1pm	The Algorithmic Colonization of Africa	Read the write up
23.03.2022, 1pm	The Tyranny of Structurelessness	Read the write up
09.03.2022, 1pm	AI in Warfare	Read the write up
23.02.2022, 1pm	N/A	Cancelled due to UCU Strikes.
09.02.2022, 1pm	“You Social Scientists Love Mind Games”: Experimenting in the “divide” between data science and critical algorithm studies	Read the write up
26.01.2022, 1pm	Which Programming Languages Use The Least Electricity?	Read the write up
12.01.2022, 1pm	Data Ethics Club’s New Years Resolutions - read the meeting summary for an overview	Read the write up
15.12.2021, 1pm	The Reith Lectures: Onora O’Neill - A Question of Trust	Read the write up
01.12.2021, 1pm: CANCELLED UCU STRIKE	NA: CANCELLED UCU STRIKE	No meeting, but feel free to have a read about the strikes here
17.11.2021, 1pm	Statistics, Eugenics, and Me	Read the write up
03.11.2021, 1pm	UK’s National AI Strategy - Pillar 3: Governing AI Effectively	Read the write up
20.10.2021, 1pm	Towards decolonising computational sciences	Read the write up
06.10.2021, 1pm	Structural Injustice and Individual Responsibility	Read the write up
NO MEETING 22.08	NO MEETING 22.08	N/A
08.09.2021, 1pm	ESR: Ethics and Society Review of Artificial Intelligence Research	Read the write up
25.08.2021, 1pm	Participant’s Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics	Read the write up
11.08.2021, 1pm	What an ancient lake in Nevada reveals about the future of tech	Read the write up
28.07.2021, 1pm	The Rise of Private Spies	Read the write up
14.07.2021, 1pm	Numberphile: The Mathematics of Crime and Terrorism - Numberphile	Read the write up
17.06.2021: Inclusive and Ethical Data Science Seminar	Responsible Data and AI by Anjali Mazumder, Intro to The Turing Way by Malvika Sharan, and FAT Forensics ToolBox by Alex Hepburn	N/A
16.06.2021: Screening of Coded Bias	Coded Bias	N/A
26.05.2021, 1pm	‘Living in the Hidden Realms of AI: The Workers Perspective’	Read the write up
12.05.2021, 1pm	Critical Perspectives on Computer Vision	Read the write up
28.04.2021, 1pm	We created poverty. Algorithms won’t make that go away	Read the write up
14.04.2021, 1pm	Identifying gaps, opportunities and priorities in the applied data ethics guidance landscape	Read the write up
31.03.2021, 1pm	Dataism is Our New God	Read the write up
17.03.2021, 1pm	#bropenscience is broken science	Read the write up
03.03.2021, 1pm	Algorithmic injustice: a relational ethics approach (Birhane, 2021)	Nina’s Twitter Summary
17.02.2021, 1pm	On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?	Natalie’s Twitter Summary
03.02.2021, 1pm	Ethics can’t be a side hustle	Nina’s Twitter Summary
20.01.2021, 1pm	Executive Summary of the Review into bias in algorithmic decision making	Brief summary on the meeting document