Assignments

Close Reading the Terms of Service

Become more familiar with the data and privacy impacts of creating an account with OpenAI, and gain experience with legal and technical texts along the way.

By Autumm Caines

Learning Objectives

  • Critically reflect on the implications of companies’ use of user data

Instructions

  1. Consider assigning a reading before the annotation about what to look for in a privacy policy and how to read a TOS.
  2. Divide the tool’s terms of service into excerpts among groups of students. (If you’re using ChatGPT: OpenAI Privacy policy; OpenAI Terms of use.)
  3. Have groups do social annotation using a tool like Hypothesis. (You could also copy the text into a collaborative writing tool like Google Docs and have students add comments.) They might flag things they find concerning, things they find surprising, or things they find confusing.
  4. Each group shares back what they think is important for their classmates to know.
  5. Further discussion might focus on the privacy trade-offs of using the tool, what if any values are embedded into these documents, what aspects students are most or least comfortable with, what a version of these documents that prioritizes the individual using the tool might look like, etc.

Using This Assignment

This assignment is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Learn more about what this license means, what you can and cannot do with this assignment, and how to properly attribute on our Using Our Content page.

Suggested Citation

Autumm Caines. Close Reading the Terms of Service. AI Pedagogy Project. https://aipedagogy.org/assignment/close-reading-the-tos/. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

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Close Reading the Terms of Service

By Autumm Caines

Become more familiar with the data and privacy impacts of creating an account with OpenAI, and gain experience with legal and technical texts along the way.

https://aipedagogy.org/assignment/close-reading-the-tos/

Learning Objectives

  • Critically reflect on the implications of companies’ use of user data

Instructions

  1. Consider assigning a reading before the annotation about what to look for in a privacy policy and how to read a TOS.
  2. Divide the tool’s terms of service into excerpts among groups of students. (If you’re using ChatGPT: OpenAI Privacy policy; OpenAI Terms of use.)
  3. Have groups do social annotation using a tool like Hypothesis. (You could also copy the text into a collaborative writing tool like Google Docs and have students add comments.) They might flag things they find concerning, things they find surprising, or things they find confusing.
  4. Each group shares back what they think is important for their classmates to know.
  5. Further discussion might focus on the privacy trade-offs of using the tool, what if any values are embedded into these documents, what aspects students are most or least comfortable with, what a version of these documents that prioritizes the individual using the tool might look like, etc.