Optimize for bridging divides
If you have kids in your life, as a parent, grandparent, caregiver, educator, or therapist you are probably thinking about AI in at least one or two of its many forms. Maybe you are actively using it yourself, maybe you’re not. Operating continuously today in the background of our lives—providing recommendations (whether we want them or not) and customer service, powering searches, delivering news to your feeds, suggesting optimal driving routes—AI is now very much foreground, requiring our attention, critical thinking, engagement, and…conversations.
It’s an ever changing landscape, which can range from overwhelming to exhilarating to all points in between. When I try to come up with analogies, I’m hard pressed to find any. Watershed moment? The closest parallel I can think of this evening as I write is before and after the iPhone. Before 2007, we didn’t have to think about what age is appropriate for children to get their own mobile phones. Today, even if your kids (or students) didn’t have digital devices yet, and you had rarely Zoomed, the pandemic changed all that, bringing devices like tablets into many homes for the first time, and making everyone Zoom experts. We did it, because we had to. It was hard. Despite the downsides of these profound changes, our efforts to engage creatively had positive repercussions.
For example, here’s an excerpt from a post I wrote in April, 2020:
I’ve been learning how to give hugs to a two-year-old at the end of video call. I’ve been learning how to bring a spirit of play and physicality to this environment I usually share with work colleagues, and more rarely, family and friends. When I have spent video time with friends, it’s typically been in short intervals. Learning to give hugs to a two-year-old at the end of the video call is certainly not something I ever aspired to learn. It is born of necessity. Today she drummed and I managed to dance to the beat using a few tiny characters I have on hand as stand-ins…it worked. We jammed.
The AI watershed is not so clear cut as the pandemic watershed. But certainly OpenAI’s release of the generative AI program, ChatGPT, on November 30, 2022 (that’s just under a year ago, folks) was a significant moment that shook up the education world, generating reactions on a continuum of panic and hand wringing to creative embrace and innovation. On the hand wringing side, New York City schools and the LA Unified School District reacted by banning its use in the classroom immediately. NYC schools have since retracted the ban, going all in toward the creative embrace side of the continuum, and according to a NYT article on 8/24/23, LAUSD is “working on a more permissive policy”—we shall see.
Meanwhile, schools from Washington State to Georgia have leaned in (this 6 min CBS video clip features schools in Gwinnett County, Georgia piloting an AI curriculum beginning in kindergarten), and a lot of schools are hovering in the middle of the continuum, straddling both ends of the continuum at once.
Where to look for resources to help you get up to speed?
The excellent Facing History and Ourselves project has created a two-part series on the impact of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E on education. It’s designed for grades 6-12, but it’s a great resource for anyone who is a generative AI novice.
I especially appreciate that the first of two “mini-lessons” is on The Ethics of Generative AI in the Classroom. Mini-lesson 1 includes this great 20 min video from Forbes that features leading voices in the Generative AI space including Aviv Ovadya from the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, another great source of resources on AI and youth.
Here’s a quote from Ovadya from the end of the video:
We need our AI systems to not just be optimizing for engagement as we've seen with things like Facebook and Tik Tok and YouTube, but for the human values that actually support society and support democracy and a big part of that is not optimizing for division which is what comes naturally out of those algorithms in many cases. And so a lot of my work recently has been around how can we instead optimize for bridging divides, making conflict productive as opposed to destructive. so that I think that is absolutely core to bake in from the beginning because we've seen what happens to society when systems that billions of people are using every day are really optimizing for division and it isn't pretty.
What is Generative AI? (15 minutes)
How Should (Or Shouldn’t) Students Use Generative AI? (20 minutes)
What Norms Should Govern Generative AI Use in Classrooms? (20 minutes)
Part 2 is Learning to Navigate Generative AI Content: Media Literacy Strategies. Activities in Part 2 include:
How Can AI-generated Content Change the Media Landscape? (20 minutes)
How Can You Evaluate AI-generated Texts? (25 minutes)
How Do Generative AI Models Create Images? (20 minutes) - this activity features a 13 minute Vox video from June, 2022 (it’s great, and a description from a particular moment in history—that is already shifting with DALL-E 3 launching soon).
The Vox video, “AI art, explained” —
Set up an account on Facing History and Ourselves to access the entirety of the modules. It’s well worth the 10 minutes that will take you. Working through the two-part series on the impact of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E on education will help you be more prepared for the ongoing conversations I encourage you to have with family and friends about these powerful new tools.
Elsewhere on Substack
Reimagining Technology by Aviv Ovadya
Thank you for reading The Interconnect. Be well.