Drawing upon decades of research into ethical issues in the design of games, Florence Chee examines the international contexts where trust must be persistent: home, school, and public/private platforms and spaces. How do AI systems leverage data gathered from those who have varying levels of ability to provide consent (such as children) in the very places where boundaries are ill-defined? In considering the pastoral as a model and framework, Chee asks the audience to weigh the Faustian bargains we strike every day in the balance between convenience and unwarranted surveillance, leading to varying degrees of risk. How are these risks communicated in lay terms and understandings? Who is implicated in the varying contexts of play in the streets, at work, and clinical settings?

In this work, Chee identifies food safety initiatives such as pasteurization, to move toward more broadly understood benefits to regulation in the games and increasingly data-hungry business models driving how we spend our work, rest, and play time. How do we govern something that presents legal and ethical challenges right now? In this talk, she proposes a pastoral framework aligned with consensus-based guidelines as advanced by the Rome Call for AI Ethics, OECD, UNESCO, and more, with which to push back against predatory and extractive relationships between users, data, and the systems in which we live.

Florence Chee is an Associate Professor of Digital Communication at Loyola University Chicago, where she directs the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy and the Social & Interactive Media Lab. Her research focuses on the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of digital media, especially games, AI, and online platforms.