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Lesson 69 min

AI Ethics & Safety

Bias, hallucination, privacy — and how to use AI responsibly.

What you will learn
  • Why models inherit bias from their training data
  • What 'hallucination' is and how to guard against it
  • Privacy basics when working with AI

Explanation

AI learns from human data, so it can absorb and amplify human bias — for example, favouring one group if the training data was skewed.

Language models also hallucinate: they can produce fluent, confident answers that are simply wrong, because they predict plausible text rather than look up facts.

The practical response is to verify important outputs, keep a human in the loop for high-stakes decisions, and protect privacy by never pasting sensitive personal data into tools you do not control. Responsible AI is less about fear and more about good habits.

Real-world use

A résumé-screening model once down-ranked candidates from certain backgrounds because it learned from biased historical hiring data — a textbook example of inherited bias.

Common mistakes
  • Treating confident AI output as automatically true.
  • Pasting private or sensitive data into tools without checking their policy.
Practice

Find one AI answer online, fact-check it against a reliable source, and note whether it held up.

Knowledge check
0/2 answered

1. Why can an AI model be biased?

2. A 'hallucination' in an LLM is...

Answer all questions to check.