By all means, A.I. Literacy for Teens

Natasha Singer, Chatbot Hype or Harm? Teens Push to Broaden A.I. Literacy, NYTimes, Dec. 13, 2023. The article opens:

It was difficult late last year for many teenagers to know what to make of the new wave of A.I. chatbots.

Teachers were warning students not to use bots like ChatGPT, which can fabricate human-sounding essays, to cheat on their schoolwork. Some tech billionaires were promoting advances in A.I. as powerful forces that were sure to remake society. Other tech titans saw the same systems as powerful threats poised to destroy humanity.

School districts didn’t help much. Many reactively banned the bots, at least initially, rather than develop more measured approaches to introducing students to artificial intelligence.

Now some teenagers are asking their schools to go beyond Silicon Valley’s fears and fantasy narratives and provide broader A.I. learning experiences that are grounded firmly in the present, not in science fiction.

“We need to find some sort of balance between ‘A.I. is going to rule the world’ and ‘A.I. is going to end the world,’” said Isabella Iturrate, a 12th grader at River Dell High School in Oradell, N.J., who has encouraged her school to support students who want to learn about A.I. “But that will be impossible to find without using A.I. in the classroom and talking about it at school.”

A survey taken at River Dell:

River Dell High, which serves about 1,000 students in an upper middle class enclave of Bergen County, is not a typical public school. When the Human Rights Club proposed to field their A.I. survey schoolwide last spring, the principal, Brian Pepe, enthusiastically agreed.

More than half of the school — 512 9th through 12th graders — answered the anonymous questionnaire. The results were surprising.

Only 18 students reported using ChatGPT for plagiarism. Even so, the vast majority of students said that cheating was their teachers’ main focus during classroom discussions about A.I. chatbots.

More than half of the students said they were curious and excited about ChatGPT. Many also said they wanted their school to provide clear guidelines on using the A.I. tools and to teach students how to use the chatbots to advance their academic skills.

The students who developed the survey had other ideas as well. They think schools should also teach students about A.I. harms.

There's more at the link.