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Teaching skills and safety on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence

Educators are racing to keep up with advances in AI, teaching their students not just how to use the tools, but how to protect themselves from misinformation, too.
Teaching skills and safety on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence
Artificial Intelligence Teens
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Everyone stands to learn new skills when it comes to artificial intelligence. But don't expect to find a textbook on it anytime soon.

Educators argue any physical text would be out of date way too quickly.

"As soon as I started working with it, I immediately knew [AI] was going to change education forever," says 7th and 8th grade social studies teacher Dan Jones.

He incorporates a custom built AI into his classroom.

"I can customize that chat bot so specifically so that it didn't write on behalf of my students."

It's not a shortcut to every answer, but a conversation starter to probe and guide students' knowledge.

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In another classroom, adults gathered to learn about how AI can be used at their business.

James Sturtevant started teaching AI to adults just 6 months ago.

"Everything that I look at that I presented in September seems prehistoric," he says.

And when it comes to consuming social media featuring more and more AI, Jeremy Carrasco is a teacher for the masses.

In just 9 months he's built ShowtoolsAI into an online classroom to help others spot artificial intelligence and fake video.

"The reason why we want to identify AI is because we want to know who to trust," Carrasco says. "Once distrust in real videos hits a bit of a breaking point, which I think that we're closer than even the AI companies understand, just to be clear — that means that a lot of our social interactions online become very, very fraught."

"If we teach media literacy skills about how to identify sources that you trust, how to even look at how old the account is and see if it's realistic that they're already that good at social media, if they've only been posting for 2 months — there are tells that normal people can do without being great at AI video spotting," Carrasco says. "I do think it's part of the toolkit that should be taught."

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This story was originally published by Clay LePard with the Scripps News Group.