“What does it mean to have children see themselves as being builders of AI technologies and not only users?” says Shruti.
This system starts out by utilizing a pair of dice to display probabilistic pondering, a system of decision-making that accounts for uncertainty. Probabilistic pondering underlies the LLMs of today, which predict the most probably next word in a sentence. By teaching an idea prefer it, this system may help to demystify the workings of LLMs for teenagers and assist them in understanding that sometimes the model’s decisions aren’t perfect but the results of a series of probabilities.
Students can modify all sides of the dice to whatever variable they need. After which they will change how likely all sides is to come back up whenever you roll them. Luca thinks it will be “really cool” to include this feature into the design of a Pokémon-like game he’s working on. But it could also display some crucial realities about AI.
Let’s say a teacher wanted to teach students about how bias comes up in AI models. The youngsters might be told to create a pair of dice after which set all sides to a hand of a distinct skin color. At first, they might set the probability of a white hand at 100%, reflecting a hypothetical situation where there are only images of white people in the info set. When the AI is asked to generate a visible, it produces only white hands.
Then the teacher can have the youngsters increase the share of other skin colours, simulating a more diverse data set. The AI model now produces hands of various skin colours.
“It was interesting using Little Language Models, since it makes AI into something small [where the students] can grasp what’s occurring,” says Helen Mastico, a middle school librarian in Hanson, Massachusetts, who taught a gaggle of eighth graders to make use of this system.
“You begin to see, ‘Oh, that is how bias creeps in,’” says Shruti. “It provides a wealthy context for educators to begin talking about and for teenagers to assume, mainly, how this stuff scale to actually big levels.”
