News Story

Dr. Tracie Farrell delivers keynote on the ethics of consent at OU GenAI Conference

Monday 24 Nov 2025

On Thursday, November 13th, 2025, KMi’s Dr. Tracie Farrell gave a keynote address to a global audience (both online and offline) at a conference on Shifting Power in Language Learning and Applied Linguistics with GenAI. Dr. Farrell is the Principal Investigator on a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship exploring intersections of Artificial Intelligence and justice through a lens of queer scholarship. Her project, Shifting Power, inspired the focus of the conference to think about AI not in terms of being a good or bad tool, but as a tool which will impact how power is preserved, amplified or shifted.

Dr. Farrell discussed how many of the consequences of AI will be felt by those that have little benefit from it, and how this challenge undermines most efforts to consider an ethical or responsible AI. To explore this further, she introduced some recent work on the ethics of consent derived from queer theory and practice, as applied to artificial intelligence development and deployment. Dr. Farrell argued that insufficient attention is given to what is actually desired with AI and how those benefits will be distributed. She describes how current attempts to gain consent can be seen as invalid, in that power relationships often allow one side to obfuscate their desire and enter insincere negotiations about how the “intimate exchange” will take place (where intimate exchange might be translated as personal or private data, IP, materials, labour practices, etc.). Moreover, any redress or repair when the exchange has gone wrong is stipulated by the more powerful entity, with little input from those who might be harmed.

Dr. Farrell suggested that universities that wish to deploy AI in the research or teaching practice should consider the motivations (desires) of all relevant parties, make sincere attempts to neutralise power asymmetry (via policy and legitimate consultation, for example) in how decisions about AI are made, and most importantly, consider deeply what world they are bringing into being through this technology.