As researchers across the University of Utah build, study, and use generative artificial intelligence (AI), they’re uncovering high-stakes ethical questions that can’t easily be solved by technologists or humanists alone.

Physician Ryan A. Metcalf is exploring how AI might help doctors decide who truly needs a blood transfusion—a common, lifesaving treatment that is also costly and often overused—without sidelining clinical judgment at the bedside.

Economist Ellis Scharfenaker is asking who will control AI’s 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 Yuree Noh (pictured above) is using AI to analyze a massive global dataset on censorship and surveillance and wonders how to ensure a large language model’s judgments hold up across countries—including authoritarian ones—without reinforcing biases that could shape policy. “I'm thinking about aid allocation, for example,” Noh said. “What if these systematic biases are affecting those who have the least power to push back?”

Researchers grappled with these questions and others at a first-of-its-kind AI and Ethics Workshop held Friday, April 3, at the University Guest House. About 75 people attended the daylong interdisciplinary event, led by One-U Responsible AI Initiative faculty fellow and philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen and his collaborator Jeff Phillips, a computer science professor and member of the initiative’s Faculty Engagement Committee.

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