Jill Watson Doesn’t Care if You’re Pregnant: Grounding AI Ethics in Empirical Studies

Jill Watson is our name for a virtual teaching assistant for a Georgia Tech course on artificial intelligence: Jill answers routine, frequently asked questions on the class discussion fo- rum. In this paper, we outline some of the ethical issues that arose in the development and deployment of the virtual teach- ing assistant. We posit that experiments such as Jill Watson are critical for deeply understanding AI ethics.