  Prior work has established the importance of integrating AI ethics topics
into computer and data sciences curricula. We provide evidence suggesting that
one of the critical objectives of AI Ethics education must be to raise
awareness of AI harms. While there are various sources to learn about such
harms, The AI Incident Database (AIID) is one of the few attempts at offering a
relatively comprehensive database indexing prior instances of harms or near
harms stemming from the deployment of AI technologies in the real world. This
study assesses the effectiveness of AIID as an educational tool to raise
awareness regarding the prevalence and severity of AI harms in socially
high-stakes domains. We present findings obtained through a classroom study
conducted at an R1 institution as part of a course focused on the societal and
ethical considerations around AI and ML. Our qualitative findings characterize
students' initial perceptions of core topics in AI ethics and their desire to
close the educational gap between their technical skills and their ability to
think systematically about ethical and societal aspects of their work. We find
that interacting with the database helps students better understand the
magnitude and severity of AI harms and instills in them a sense of urgency
around (a) designing functional and safe AI and (b) strengthening governance
and accountability mechanisms. Finally, we compile students' feedback about the
tool and our class activity into actionable recommendations for the database
development team and the broader community to improve awareness of AI harms in
AI ethics education.
