AI Literacy Is a Workforce Requirement. Are K-12 Schools Ready?

0:00Welcome back season two episode 11 of AGI Schools Out Saturday, where we are trying to talk about preparing students for their future, not our past. I have to meet today, Kristen Kaser, who is a senior lead in the Midwest for AIEDU and you know what, I'm going to read their mission statement because it's so lines with this podcast. So the AI education project is a 511c3 nonprofit devoted to making sure that all students are ready to live, work, and thrive in a world where AI is everywhere. This podcast could not have said it better ourselves, Kristen. Tell us a little bit about yourself. You're out of Dayton, Ohio, correct? Yeah, so I am a Ohio and born and raised. So I grew up down in Dayton, Ohio, went to school at Ohio University, not the Ohio State

1:00but Ohio University. Ohio's first and finest university. And then I moved up to Cleveland area where I was a high school math teacher at Cleveland Heights High School. Most famous for being the high school where the Kelsey brothers went to school. Teachers there for nine years taught high school math, everything from algebra to AP calculus. Then went over to Cleveland Metro where I was a master learning specialist high school principal and then made my way back down to Dayton, Ohio down here, worked for the college board for a few years in their state and district partnership division. And then now with AIEDU, doing partnership work around the Midwest related to AI implementation, strategy, and training for educators. That is awesome. So what are you seeing? Let's just start with a conversation that I had not too long ago with a workforce development leader here in Hamilton County, Indiana. And their comment to me was that the only students right now that really need to be getting

2:03education around AI are ones who are going to be building and deploying AI at a software engineer level. And I just found that to be very wrong. That's not what I see. What do you see with the landscape? How important do you think it is for kids to be exposed to and learning about how to safely deploy AI? Yeah, everything I've heard and conversations I've heard from folks in the workforce higher ed and even legislators is it's extremely important that they are seeing this high demand in the workforce that's not going to go away, but only as increasing. They really see higher ed as that bridge between K-12 and workforce, but that K-12 really is a huge lift right now to make sure that students are engaging with AI and not necessarily with the tools on a daily basis, but really understanding when we talk about AI literacy, we're talking about they really have the ability to collaborate with AI as a tool to really

3:04enhance what they're doing, not replace what they're doing, but how to use it as a collaboration tool to really build upon what they are being asked to in the classroom. And that's what workforce is really going to be looking for are students that had the skills to use AI as a collaboration tool to really make there be more efficient and push their thinking further. And you and I met in an initiative here in Indiana called Sail. Can you speak a little bit more to that? Yeah, so it's an initiative out of the Central Indiana ESC and they're really looking through some work that they've done with their own learning within the organization are looking to really take that and see how they can scale it up for educators in Indiana and they're doing that by developing a brand new credentialing program that they want to have available to educators that really gives them targeted training and skills not just in pedagogy and in the classroom, but getting them a deep understanding of AI as a technology and how it is going to be needed

4:06to be used in the workforce. So it's a really unique and innovative approach. I would say for the ESC to be tackling and the advisory group they have is, you know, across all sectors, they've got folks like us, they've got industry partners, higher ed, K-12 leaders really come into the table to think about how they can support these educators from all angles and give them a really deep learning experience that results in the credential. It's somehow they're stuck in a podcaster with a passion for AI and education and I'm honored by that. It's so cool to be part of that conversation. One of the mismatches that I see that I wonder if you could speak to is so my daughter's in high school at a pre-good high school out in Hamlin County and their teachers have been receiving education on Google Classroom and AI education for two years now. I listened to one of the board meetings and yet they're still pushing back being students using it in the classroom. Like, I'm not sure we have time for teachers to take the nights a couple years to figure out AI while they're repressing the use of these tools for

5:10students. How do you feel about that? Yeah, I think that's what we're seeing a lot. We saw a lot of schools jump to adopt AI tools without districts thinking about the actual strategy behind the implementation, not just, you know, for the educators in their planning but how it was going to be used with students in the classroom and even one thing we talk about is how as a district they're going to use it so not just in the classroom but how is their HR team going to implement AI? How is payroll going to implement AI? So that disconnect we're seeing is kind of not a unified AI strategy for the whole district. So purchasing a tool is one thing getting teachers trained on that tool helps them understand how to use it but having really intentionally thought out strategy as a district this is how we see AI being used. This is how we're going to train our teachers and this is our expectation for how it's going to be used in the classroom. So that kind of alignment from the district level all the way down to what it looks like in the hands of students is what we're seeing. It's kind of the gap that's missing taking an intentional time to have some kind of

6:11AI task force that has stakeholders so bringing together parents and students and community members and district members to the table to say as a district how do we envision AI being utilized across the board and then that really guiding the implementation and practice. Can I tell you my most proud and moment recently as an AI enthusiast parent my daughter came to me probably six months ago and it was like that because you know there's been eye roles for the last three years I've been knee deep and they're neck deep and chat deep between everything I'm always asking her and her friends how they're using it and they roll their eyes with me and for a while it was just Snapchat and the internet development but she came to me and she's like that I am using chat GBT I'm not cheating I use it to help me study I just I want you to know and I'm not sure you should tell mom because she's automatically gonna think I'm cheating and I said me and those don't two things you could tell me about AI that would really concern me which is either that A you're not using it at all or that B you have some kind of weird relationship where you think it's like your

7:12boyfriend or some kind of city of being other than that you're gonna need this tool so go ahead but then fast forward three months and she comes in and goes can you show me how to do this thing with quad and I was like wait a minute I thought you were using chat GBT and she said chat GBT just seems to give me stupid answers and tell me what I want to hear quad is much better to and I was like my daughter has model surfing and learning the ins and outs of LOMs what a proud moment through yeah and that's such a huge piece that we want for students that you know is missing is that ability to really think critically about what the tools giving them and and analyze those outputs and seeing you know recognizing that it's just you know kind of giving her that um confidence bias of like agreeing with everything that she says and not pushing back and that's what we want students to do really is the huge piece of what we consider being AI literate is not just taking what AI says recognizing that you know maybe I should try and evaluate a different tool to see if it's going to give me a better response or so yeah that's absolutely a proud uh AI champion father moment

8:15there it was and the circle was complete because I said well that's called sick of dancing she went whatever she didn't want to learn that much but she's probably a teacher I'd use quad a little better ed so yeah stepping back to the business case and no one's gonna hold the feet to the fire on this but I think when magic school came out at school I came out I started to think wow that because I worked in healthcare industry at the time and I'm like well education is actually lucky because they have this vertical AI tools that you know really make it a little bit easier to navigate because it's customized to the data sets that they're using and the tasks that they're using but now as we step back more and more it's starting to look like Google and some of these giant platforms are eventually going to provide all those tools across I mean Google seems to be the bohemus that has every angle covered right and so while I'm a huge anthropic fan I can see businesses switching from their base of work being an email based you know whether it's Google

9:18Microsoft or whatever to being a foundation model again if if you look at chat gbt or you look at anthropic like Google has that plus you two plus they already have an email they already have way to communicate it's not so I think it's just it's wow it's gonna be hard to compete with Google eventually in all these spaces okay I think we've seen that you know with you know Google classroom really kind of you know taking the lead in a lot of schools and districts going with that but I think that's one reason why when we work with districts we try to be tool agnostic so whatever the tool is and especially in the age of AI if you're constantly chasing the next best thing that's going to be changing day to day and even hour hour as all these you know attack companies and even just technology companies are constantly improving so it's really about strategy and all that regardless of the tool and knowing that whatever tool you have they're eventually most likely going to get caught up everyone is just constantly improving finding ways to adapt all these so you

10:18really can't keep chasing the next you know you'll truly really have to commit and say we're going to you know stick with this one um and work with it as is but have that overall strategy still for how you want it to be implemented um yeah and to and tech if you keep chasing the next best tool you'll be running around in circles nonstop you know that it's funny because I said back in I think about these things sometimes and one time I was kind of contemplating like will like for real school private school that has unlimited funds like and has access to the best tools are their kids going to come out like leads ahead of the kids who went to just a public school in a metropolitan area and now I sort of think no it may be exactly opposite because the kids in the metropolitan school who had to use the last generation of tools and get them to they really know how to work with the bare minimum tool and so when they get introduced to the high end tool they're not going to have any problem interfaces with it yeah and they actually will have

11:21those like you know problem solving skills because they're going to have to figure out the work around some of the things to make whatever tool they have do what it is they need they're going to that's why the vibe coding is so exciting is that you know if it's the tools not going to do what you need it to do vibe coding allows them to create their own and and really you know build their own without having to have any coding or computer science background they can use that to you know make it work for them which is what's so exciting I think vibe coding really helps to close that gap as far as you know the haves and they have lots of different schools and districts and settings and it's kind of kind of cool because as a lay person you can use this stuff like I'm somewhat of a realist and up until the beginning of this year you vibe coding if you couldn't retote it all like you might be able to create a prototype to show a software engineer to build something but you weren't going to create something functional and Google again in the AI studio now they've added a function that will add the database to the back end of what you're grabbing they're just taking the lift away to the point where someone who does not understand SQL or Python

12:25or anything else can actually build a functional working product with nothing but natural language that is insane yeah oh yeah I've seen it in action our CEO Alex is really big and divide coding right now and has had us as a team just play around with it and try things out and we're using it as a staff to really troubleshoot some different projects and things that were on and he really pushes us to think about you know how it applies to our work I've seen teachers utilize it to really you know build tools there's something that they want something to do that it's not and so they have used it to build you know thinking about taking their benchmark data and really getting some actionable practice students can do to target their week areas without having to go to any kind of curriculum tool they've really built that themselves so it's really been exciting to watch how it's being applied in lots of different lenses I think that is awesome I talked to businesses about that I mean if you're a thousand plus person business you probably want a hub spot or Salesforce CRM but if you're a medium-sized small business like you could spin up a CRM

13:32I'm coding it and not spend all that money and how to customize to exactly what you want to capture and the functionality you want like well that that is just what a what a win for everybody across the board yeah absolutely so let's talk a little bit about the Midwest I'm born here in Indiana raised in Alpasso, Texas I've lived all over the country I have came back here I think it's a great place to raise kids I think the Midwest has its pros and cons I don't want to get political but I've definitely a conservative and so I'm pretty comfortable in Indiana on that one and I'm comfortable in that and when I was looking at California and some of their okay so everything has a pros and cons but what I see you're a Midwest rep what I see is Indian is Indiana seems to be a little bit behind Ohio and the United States as a whole already has like this the least excited about AI of any developed country in the world like what are you seeing on the on the pushback

14:35side of things and how does the Midwest like are we sectionally as Kentucky out Kentucky house Ohio house India what does that look like is the different states of state or do we have kind of a Midwest vibe as the flyover country is that you know some of the coasterners would like to think of us yeah so with a huge need for data centers the Midwest has become super attractive for you know the construction of those because of you know us having you know vast amount of and you know developed land having water sources natural water sources to pull from which are needed for cooling in the data center so we've become a huge you know you know area where they're looking at target but it's different it's been different state by state on how that's been accepted and implemented so Ohio was the first one to really you know accept that challenge and develop a lot of data centers we probably have twice as many data centers as any state surrounding us right now so we really kind of you embraced that notion of being kind of like the Silicon Valley

15:40of the Midwest and now that's starting to you know and that's many huge push you know it's been accepted by you know our government legislation really fed into that our higher ed is really fed into that with some of the the programs that they're developing and then offering and then that's really trickled down to K-12 so it's kind of been a whole thing seeing the value of that and the push for that and I think now other states are starting to go down that same path they're a little bit more hesitant because as AI has really taken off these last few years and those data centers are up and functional on that they're starting to see that environmental impact that comes along with that so yes there might be this big economic boost as far as jobs and all that stuff that comes along with the production of those data centers and then the roles that are needed but the biggest concern which I've heard actually most loudly from students is the concerns about the environmental impact it's going to have and so as I've seen as it's been happening in Indiana and Michigan the the you know plans for data centers to be built that's where we've seen a lot more pushback I would

16:41say in the communities in Indiana and Michigan particularly Michigan but because of the concern about the environmental impact it's going to have and that's you know very real right now we had this huge you know surge of building these data centers and the huge surge in the use of AI and are just now realizing the impact it can have environmentally but we also now have the technology that I think is going to help solve that problem you know in very quickly so can I speak to that a little bit yeah the energy thing is the Israel and the energy price is rising Israel and there's a conversation we need to be having with the with Nvidia and with Microsoft and they need to be offsetting that cost so that residents don't end up with catastrophic energy bells because of data centers the water usage thing first of you can use air cooled but the water usage thing we live in the Midwest and we use 18,000 times more water to grow corn to feed cows

17:43than those data centers are using so it's a little bit of a misnomer on that and it these teenagers like TikTok produces 10 times more carbon dioxide the amount of TikTok use in the United States as large language models currently do so some of it is a matter of perspective and what what the news likes to focus on and demonize and I think we can get past the demonized stuff then you can get to the real conversation which is okay yes the construction companies and everybody else have built these data centers once they're built okay now there's a lot of hands-hold people working in a data center however like all of the industries that want to be next to that data center so that they have access to those room and and each 200 chips are going to start growing up and that's also looking on Valley type idea like really can allow your flourish so I just I see a lot of that push back in Indiana and I wish it was more around like let's just make sure that you guys aren't expecting us to pay for the energy that you're using and and if you look at the

18:46Elon down in Memphis like he builds his own he doesn't fall regulations I'm an SEL on he breaks up and then apologizes later but he builds his own energy sources next to those gigantic data centers and I think Tennessee and Ohio and some of these some of these states that are really embracing data centers you're gonna see them economically flourish going forward vastly in the next five to 10 years yeah and I think I do think it'll start spreading out I think Indiana once they start you know get in that momentum in moving and say with Michigan they'll start to see that same trajectory now with Ohio kind of really leading the way and why while we have in the technology as far as the development of the data centers we're starting to push that way as far as education goes so really Ohio is starting to lead the way as far as K-12 and AI education policy so this summer actually there's legislation that every K-12 district in Ohio has to have an AI policy in place by July 1st which is one step but as I'm meeting with districts I'm finding beyond checking that

19:49mark of having that AI policy there's not a lot of movement around actual AI implementation and things like that in Indiana I'm doing a lot of work right now because they actually have the digital learning grant open right now which is kind of a way of not just saying hey put these things in place but actually funding you know actual practices helping districts purchase the tools and get professional development and training that they need so in a lot of ways in Indiana's kind of ahead of Ohio as far as actually supporting the actual practice of using AI in their K-12 setting yeah I can see that and what's interesting well for one thing you're being home like hats off to Ohio because I know Ohio State and Bullard Green were two of the very first universities to integrate AI deeply into the curriculum outside of STEM so that I've been watching that for two years now and that that is awesome but I have seen pockets of K-12 in Indiana really adapting and you know Hunter Hickman who's in that group with us he is the district AI lead in Jasper County

20:49which is the most rural county in Indiana and it's funny because I actually went to call and I was like why would the most rural county in Indiana of a district AI lead when like half the metropolitan and upscale suburb counties are pushing back the incident and the answer that came back was fascinating which was perhaps rural counties AI is not a new thing to them because machine learning and farming have been you know that that has been integrated in the agriculture for a long time not prediction models but machine learning and so it's not that new of the technology to them and so they're not that skeptical of it I just I found that to be a fascinating answer have you seen a different level of adoption at metropolitan versus suburban versus rural in the west I know that we as an organization have put a big you know push on supporting rural I think because what it comes down to is metropolitan they my time in Cleveland for example they're always very innovative they have a lot of you know wrap around organizations of things that support

21:54you know what's going on so they sometimes have a lot more flexibility with trying new tools and all of that I think when you get into smaller districts especially rural they can really benefit from AI because it really helps with a capacity issue if we have you know an issue with staffing and and all this kind of stuff how can we use AI to give students experiences or access to content and classes that we currently may not have the capacity to do it really helps them think about how to work smarter not harder with the resources that they have a lot what I've seen more with metropolitan is they're more of the ones that are likely to purchase the tools give it to their teachers and harder to develop some kind of district-wide implementation strategy and thinking about it all the way down with a smaller district or rural districts it's a lot easier because it's a smaller community there's a there a lot more in tune from top to bottom about what's going on so I think they're able to be a little bit more strategic and smaller districts and suburbs just because of this size of their organization and really look being able to look at and really do some trial and

22:55air and make some like real-time shifts in adjustment adjustments in that makes a lot of sense and I can't say enough about 100 you know he I think he and three of his colleagues went to some a I still another they came back and went to the superintendent and said hey I think we need to explore this and then in an offensive implementing Khan mega which is Khan Academy and it's not really a prediction model anyway so they picked the safest space that they could possibly do but now he's got a consulting firm and he's doing talk everywhere and I'm like I hope that other teachers see like how much you've gone from just being a wrestling coach in the NL like ELI teacher to like kind of a champion on this new front and follow your lead because this stuff is going to change the way I when I look at kids today I mean what do you tell high school kids they should be studying if they can do and say like I want to go to college what should I study it's because we don't know what's ahead for them it's not even so important like what they study it's almost you know how many of us are doing what we went to college for it's really what's going to

24:00be more important for our students is they have this notion of your it does not going to matter because it's what's going to be important is that you're a lifelong learner these skills are constantly changing so what you go to college for is not going to matter as much as you knowing how to upskill and get more information as you go and that I think is the hugeest thing we're going to press upon students right now particularly high school students is that learning is it's no longer going to be I've got my diploma and I'm good is this notion of it's going to be ongoing learning throughout your life because the technology is going to constantly be changing the needs of the workforce are going to be constantly changing so they've really got to have that mindset of it's it's an ongoing experience learning not just a four more years of college and then I'm good I would agree I think design thinking like being able to find problems to credit argument like critical thinking a lot combined with being able to work in a multi a multi functional team like you're definitely going to have to be able to you may be smaller teams doing a whole lot more work but if you can't communicate with the rest of the team in a in a

25:04pretty collaborative way that's going to that's going to kind of be a tough one but there there are industries so for instance I didn't get a college degree and when I got into healthcare and then kind of non-profit space there was right before Chad GBT I I was saying if I had it to do all over again I would go back and get my degree in marketing and make it an MBA that has completely changed there is no way in hell I would go to school for marketing like I and because that that that industry is going to shrink and just the people with great skills are going to be kind of the air traffic controllers along the tools that that put all that out I would I tell students now like data basics is something that you should understand like if you understand how data works and flows and I don't think it's a bad idea to take computer science classes because the machines do think differently than we do the reason why we've really seen a proliferation of agentic tooling in software spaces because everything is done very systematically in that world so it translates

26:07very easily if you can take that kind of thinking walk into a business and help them figure out how to map out their workflows and the data that that feeds those workflows what like you will be super valuable for the next decade oh yeah absolutely absolutely and that's one of the things we just put out a report with the Burning Glass Institute about the really looked at a bunch of research that looked at what are they looked at thousands of job postings at the skills that we're being looked for in the workforce then they looked at 140 different high school standards that were being taught and they found these 49 interconnecting skills that really like are the bridge between what being done in high school and what's needed in the workforce and then looked at those skills about how AI interplays with them and there are some skills that are you know very can be very highly automated so note taking you know summarizing those things and those are skills that you know students need to learn how to use AI to automate those things but then there's ones that can never be

27:08automated like leadership collaboration critical thinking and then all these ones in between and so it's really through looking at you know it's AI is never going to totally take the place of jobs because there's always going to need to be that human component but what it's going to do is it's going to take some of those you know more time consuming lower level tasks and eat those that eat those time up and take that away so that there's more time spent in the higher level thinking of careers and work so it's going to be more important that students when they go into a profession that they need to deeply understand it because there's not going to be this waste of time anymore on some of these tasks that AI can automate they've got to truly know their trade their practice their career and be able to really think deeply so it's really going to push them to really you know actually have to learn more and do more with whatever the profession is that they're going into I love that perspective I think it's so true why here these studies about AI diminishing critical thinking I think that's not using AI very well because actually AI just feeds up everything that I'm doing and I have to think more critically and it sometimes like I just have to take a break

28:14because you know you've got so much going on and it is doing all that mundane stuff so for instance show notes for podcasts like this which usually takes about an hour like I'll just be called the transcript and it's green shot of your LinkedIn and it will generate those show notes and in the five minutes it takes it to use the skills I've built to do that I'll be off doing something that's a lot more valuable but that takes a lot more thoughts and just copying and pasting and so sometimes I think we may have to relook at and I've kind of thrown this out there more of the European type of model of workday so where you're working for a half a day then you take a break for a little while reset and then you come back and reengage oh yeah absolutely I think one of my favorite ways I've seen it in practice is when I take my son to the doctor now they use AI transcription tools so that they don't have to worry about spending time charting and taking notes and remembering those conversations they have they can spend more time talking to their patients and then they go back and and look at you know and they they don't know if you watch the pit but they've addressed this in the season of the pit on HBO is the same they're

29:18looking at you know using that in their setting on the show but using AI to capture the notes that are going on so that then they can actually spend more time with the patients thinking about you know reading through those notes and making sure to capture anything and thinking about their actual diagnosis and all that stuff so it's for me that's a real good real world you know work example of you know taking away something that we really want our doctors that all of us training spending time typing up notes into a system or do we want them spending that time actually practicing medicine wow now that opens up a conversation this is where I think our conversation should be around artificial intelligence rather should we or should we not be utilizing it so I I read the book AI and healthcare which was a doctor a medical doctor that helped train DaVinci one of the three models to chat GPT-3 and it was kind of the medical smaller model and the the question that he posed is in a situation like that in a large healthcare let's let's just use iU health because

30:21you and I are both familiar with iU health I might say and they would do this but like if a doctor spends on average seven minutes in front of a patient and four minutes of that is note-taking and artificial intelligence can take those notes and then gives them back four minutes then does the hospital system allow that doctor seven minutes of face time with a patient or in suicide doctor see one point seven patients every set it increased their load now I think you can see the same thing in education if you know that could happen if AI day is doing lesson planning and helping with all these things then is the education system going to start then expecting a classroom indicate through 12 to look like it does to the university where you're in auditorium fall seats yeah I think if it happens where they're using it to justify uploading that you know increasing the workload it's totally losing the vision for how AI can change our workforce it's all about you know that human component and how we can leverage that AI can take on a larger workload

31:25but we want to make sure that you know we're letting it take on that piece that it can automate so we can spend more time doing the actual human work of it and so I think we'll naturally probably start to lead that way I think so because that's the nature of you know everything we said in the classrooms all the time you know is adding in more students not thinking about the impact on the educator or the students but in practice it should be really focused on if AI is taking away this time we really are doing that to allow our practitioners to get more time using their expertise to service their their patients their students their clients in the best way possible so there's always that you know we know this is how it should be and then there's the actual how does it end up playing out in society it's hard to you know it's hard to imagine you know a world where we actually do what we should do with advancing technology versus what ends up happening I agree I agree but it's even harder to have those conversations when your conversations are

32:28off when the song whether or not we should implement a technology that's inevitably going to get implemented regardless and so I think in the workplace I'm starting to hear the conversations of you know yeah the business is getting great so I can be more productive as an individual like if I'm really leveraging AI but how am I getting compensated for the fact that I just became twice as productive am I getting a pay raise am I getting some free time and the free time thing doesn't seem to resonate with people who are really into AI because they're getting so re-engaged with their work that they're spending more time working because they actually enjoy what they're doing again but the the diffusion of the benefits from AI throughout the entirety of society as a conversation that I think we really should be strongly having right now yeah and I think highlighting those cases like we have our Midwest Trailblazers program right now which is a fellowship and we just heard yesterday unsolicited a you know an example of that from one of the participants who really

33:31said in her testimonial of AI has really helped reinvigorate her about teaching about the excitement you know she had kind of so that exact same thing it's getting folks excited about their professions and giving them more time to dig into the components that they really you know enjoyed before you know no teacher wants to sit and spend all this time necessarily grading things or you know some of those mundane things that but really having that time to actually dig in and give authentic feedback on student work is much different than you know just scoring everything or responding to emails things like that it is nice to have the tutor in your pocket that can help you walk through things that some people may may have not approached the subject because some of the some subject matter was stuff that didn't really resonate with them was they didn't feel they had enough enough proficiency in to to be able to move forward and now you can just go to a chat GPT or a quad and say hey explain this to me I used to say explain this to me like I'm an eighth grader if you do that it gives you amologies and like the language of an eighth grader so now I say

34:34it's going this to me like I'm educated an eighth grade reading level and then it just perfectly like I explain this I think that's super valuable yeah absolutely I've done that with and as I mentioned that report that we just did with the burning bus institute it's a very lengthy 60 page document I'm getting ready to talk to a group of parents and while everything in there is not relevant there's definitely some things that highlights about you know workforce future for their students that I thought would be valuable I had it go through through the lens of a parent what a parent would want to know coming out of this report and it really highlighted just four succinct things and even put it together in like a one-pager that I could give to parents so I've started using it when I've got this big pool of research or a report to really say coming at it through this lens what would be really helpful to know so that I don't have to hand a parent a 60 page report and say hey this is really good information read through it to find like the five lines of information that is relevant to you but I can pull that out so that we can have

35:34a conversation about what information is in that report versus you know overwhelming them with something super lengthy and the same thing I can use it to say I'll give it the lens of through which I want to process this information it will help me pull out what is actually relevant to them versus just handing them over this big meaty document yeah that's an amazing use case I work real near Purdue University and I have two well-or-grad kids so I'm a big Purdue fan but when I talk to Purdue students and they ask like what's what's one use case where I can really use AI I say well next time you have a job interview go into Google no book Ellen but do deep research on the company you're about to go to let us fill that no book up and then generate an audio podcast overview of that of that company and listen to it on your way to the interview and you will walk in there knowing more about that company than anybody who normally comes in to do an interview like little things like that are just such great uses of time oh yeah

36:35there's so many and I think that's what we need more of are just like little vignettes of use cases so I'm a member of our junior league here in the Dayton area and I just did a lunch and learn for our members that was through the lens of you know busy women who are you know working moms wives how to use AI and did a bunch of just like example use cases of things and they a lot of them I surveyed them before and said like you know what your comfort level with AI what do you how do you use it a lot of them like I've dabbled and concerned about privacy and all that kind of stuff but afterwards they're like seeing it actually examples of how it can be used like is what shifts that kind of thinking around AI so that that brings me to another big question I'd love to ask you which and I'll give you kind of a little context to it the guy that runs mine studio which is an authentic AI platform like level bowl or replete or innate in Demetri Shapiro was a big shot of Google for a while now I was this company I had him all my podcasts one time and I was asking him so I thought I was going to get together and Daria on the day and some of the some of the key figures

37:38that you're kind of see in the news and you basically said like the fact that a layperson like you even knows those names is is evidence that's ridiculous how much news ad gets and it was kind of something but I don't think you realize how like how deep in this stuff that I really get I say all that to say like I know who Miramarati is and Fei-Fei Li and Fiji Simo I guarantee you those names are not common household names the women in tech like the women leaders in tech is just not a big enough like how do we make that more robust going forward if you know we're talking about weapons destruction you need more females at the table in seats of high authority and power how do we encourage the next generation of young female tech leaders yeah and that's been a challenge for years and we've seen some growth but not a lot there's so much initiatives around you know women and computer science and all these things so we're starting to see you know a little bit

38:41of traction but not as much as we need I think one of the things is having conversations around the you know how AI is generated there it's all human developed so all it is all that it's so much based on how we train AI and all of that it was at AI summit just yesterday and doing session with district leaders and part I started off with an opener that's one of the little snapshot activities that we've developed at AIU to you and it was designed for middle school students but basically it has you know the activity to summer up is you put into an lm ask it to generate the image of a girl with brown hair what does it generate it generates four images of a white female with brown hair because that is how it's it's default setting is what we call it it's been trained to do that and then we had the audience members do it with another simple prompt so whenever someone said generate for me a image of a scientist a lot of times it defaults to a male you know it has all these implicit biases that are built in because we're it's built by humans

39:43it's going to have the same kind of bias and so that was one of the conversations we had and one of my breakout groups was you know an activity like this could get students to see particularly females like it's important that you are involved in you know in like in Hamilton at the room where it happened and it's important that you are involved in the development of these tools so that we minimize that bias that's there and the training and the development and all of that that kind of you know it's just one example of how to like visually maybe motivate or entice students to get them to actually see through their own usage the bias that is built into these systems just because of the default setting of the data that's uploaded into them so I think as much as we have conversations around all that with students and I think you know having the AI tool as part of the learning process is going to start to I think just hopefully naturally get students really interested in seeing ways that it can interplay with things that they're excited about and find those inroads but it's just going to take a lot of exposure making sure that our female students are typically underrepresented students have that equal amount of exposure

40:48which comes down to making sure it's not just in the you know upper middle class schools but all schools have access and exposure to these technologies and that vibe coding like we said give any student that and hopefully that will spark the interest in them and developing kind of tools and how to engage with the technology so exposure is the best thing we can do with making sure that there's equitable access and students having exposure to the technologies and the capabilities of it. What a great use case and I think there's a flywheel effect to that so if you use age appropriate learning from kindergarten on up with this and I use that this example many times I'll use it one more time like when I was a kid there was a schoolhouse rock like how bill becomes how does the legislation it was animated really cool if you started in kindergarten exposing children to all these models work under the hood at age appropriate levels I think that would seriously decrease the number of kids who fall in love with character AIs their deniers target

41:52in when they're 14 years old and then die by suicide because they think there's a sentient being that they're interacting with in a large language but they understood that the inner working of it by time they're 14 they're going to be like huh they would laugh at the fact that it can mimic human beings so well like I often do like I'll pinch myself once a while be like wow I can't believe the outputs that this thing is but I know no point in time to my confuse in the thinking as this thing become like self-awareness is it conscious when those days may come but we already have especially young boys developing relationships with these things that are unhealthy and that are just unrealistic because they don't understand how they worked absolutely and that's why you know at the vendors that yesterday there was a student panel whilst panel was a high school student and then some like more younger young adults and they were asked the question should you elementary students have access or be using AI technology and they overwhelmingly they all said no we don't think as a place in elementary school and while I can go back and forth on that

42:55that issue what I think is important is that we're developing AI literacy with students at elementary school and they don't have to be actually engaging with the tool to develop AI literacy it's those conversations around biases that understanding of how they work and that should start young because before they even get their first access to a tool to freely use they need to understand how it works why it works the way it does how to actually effectively work with it and that I think is the important skills that we start developing in elementary so by the time first time that they are using the tool itself they already have that foundational understanding of how to interact with it and why it works the way it does that is so well said I'm going to conclude there because that is such a golden I love the idea that you can build AI literacy without exposing them to direct access to the tools but you're educating them so that when they do get access they actually know what what the biases are what what the dangers are what to say to you I'm going to ask you one last question are you did you ever see the movie The Brushless Club of course many many times

43:59well I have fun with thumbnails for the podcast we can just made everybody it's made me an artist without being an artist and you know there are some artists who don't like that but I like to go to chat GPT and build my thumbnails every month based on a school based movie so do you have a favorite scene from The Brushless Club because I'm going to put the two of us in a scene from The Brushless Club for this time okay I love the scene when they are dancing all around the library specifically when they are on top of the you know bookshelf they're in the library and kind of dancing around that's I think is one of my favorites done yes excellent scene excellent scene thank you thank you so much Kristen this is a great conversation thank you so much for having me Jason this was fun keep up the amazing work thank you look forward to connecting soon things just get real looks like this dude's riffing on 11 laps is this guy using 11 laps and I wonder what model he'll work with next week yeah right that wave