Enlisting AI to Mainstream Ethics in Spatial Data Science Education

ABSTRACT This article examines ethics instruction in GIS and Spatial Data Science curricula. Our point of departure is the widely endorsed recommendation of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that formal ethics education be integrated throughout data science curricula. This call resonates in our field, reflected in the recent centering of ethics within a prominent model curriculum. These developments raise two questions: What is the current state of ethics education in our field, and what strategies are available to advance it? We report on an assessment of ethics instruction in Penn State University's Online Geospatial Education program, highlighting two pedagogical approaches—guided discussion of ethics scenarios and student analysis of case studies—while noting constraints posed by the limited number of ethics scenarios and case studies. The article concludes by demonstrating an AI‐assisted method for generating ethics scenarios and case studies to expand geospatial ethics instruction.