Microsoft, Google-Backed Group Wants To Boost AI Education in Low-Income Schools (bloomberg.com) 34
The AI Education Project has developed curriculum to help teachers and students understand artificial intelligence. From a report: With students taking advantage of ChatGPT for homework and term papers, there's a lot of handwringing about whether artificial-intelligence tools are appropriate for school. Alex Kotran said his group wants to make sure those tools are used even more. Kotran is the chief executive officer of the AI Education Project (aiEDU), a nonprofit backed by companies such as Microsoft, Alphabet's Google, OpenAI and AT&T, that provides free materials and teacher training to boost AI understanding in school districts. The idea is to teach kids about the technology, its limits and promise, and prepare them jobs where they'll need to use AI.
The group on Tuesday is announcing a national call for AI education with an expanded list of backers and partner schools at the South by Southwest EDU conference in Austin, Texas. So far, aiEDU has reached 100,000 students and has relationship with districts representing 1.5 million low-income and underserved kids across the country. The non-profit was founded in 2019, and Kotran thought it would take a few years before there was widespread demand from educators for these kinds of programs. "We were kind of wearing the T-shirt before the band was cool," he said. Instead the rapid increase in interest in generative AI with the popularity of programs like OpenAI's chatbot and Dall-E, its tool for digital images, has dramatically boosted demand, and the group could use more funding, he said.
The group on Tuesday is announcing a national call for AI education with an expanded list of backers and partner schools at the South by Southwest EDU conference in Austin, Texas. So far, aiEDU has reached 100,000 students and has relationship with districts representing 1.5 million low-income and underserved kids across the country. The non-profit was founded in 2019, and Kotran thought it would take a few years before there was widespread demand from educators for these kinds of programs. "We were kind of wearing the T-shirt before the band was cool," he said. Instead the rapid increase in interest in generative AI with the popularity of programs like OpenAI's chatbot and Dall-E, its tool for digital images, has dramatically boosted demand, and the group could use more funding, he said.
A is for Axiom, your home sweet home. (Score:3)
B is for Buy n' Large, your Very Best Friend.
https://youtu.be/vLmuDmd9Ymk?t... [youtu.be]
This is exactly where we're headed, only it's almost now, not 500 years like Idiocracy or 700 years like my example, WALL-E
Re:A is for Axiom, your home sweet home. (Score:4, Funny)
Listen to the A.I. It knows more than you.
Trust the A.I. The A.I. doesnt have motives.
Believe the A.I. Knowing is hard.
You will get an A in this class if you Listen. Trust. Believe. Any answer that disagrees with the A.I. is wrong.
Re: (Score:1)
There is no Feedback Loops in AI programming. no need to correct for them.
Re:A is for Axiom, your home sweet home. (Score:4, Informative)
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Re: (Score:1)
Hide your white-out.
Fragile objects make nice sounds when dropped from high places..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
You will get an A in this class if you Listen. Trust. Believe. Any answer that disagrees with the A.I. is wrong.
Yes, you're right. Mankind has only been infected with the Disease of Greed for thousands of years, leading to the destruction of the only place humans can call home right now. Who are we to question why we will repeat the worst of our history. Again.
Hey, look on the bright side. Maybe before we almost extinct ourselves this time we'll pull enough shit out of the sands of time to actually prove we've been dumb enough to do this before.
We'll find validation in that. Somehow.
Re: (Score:2)
You will get an A in this class if you Listen. Trust. Believe. Any answer that disagrees with the A.I. is wrong.
Yes, you're right. Mankind has only been infected with the Disease of Greed for thousands of years, leading to the destruction of the only place humans can call home right now. Who are we to question why we will repeat the worst of our history. Again.
Hey, look on the bright side. Maybe before we almost extinct ourselves this time we'll pull enough shit out of the sands of time to actually prove we've been dumb enough to do this before.
We'll find validation in that. Somehow.
You got more faith in the universe than I do. We'll kill ourselves off, never knowing if there's another intelligence out there, and never knowing if this is a loop of some kind we've stuck ourselves in. May whatever comes after us be smarter than we were. I'm thinking there may be a point, probably back around the time we decided fire needed to be more than just a little warmth in the back of the cave, where we fucked up, and we've kept fucking up ever since.
If the machines do us in, we've had it coming fo
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Sounds like religion.
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Yep, and when everyone is educated in coding and AI, who will plant and grow the crops and fix the plumbing?
Or even teach the robots how to do it?
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Yep, and when everyone is educated in coding and AI, who will plant and grow the crops and fix the plumbing?
Farmers and plumbers.
You might as well ask "when everyone is educated in reading, writing, science, and math, who will plant and grow the crops and fix the plumbing?"
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B is for Buy n' Large, your Very Best Friend.
https://youtu.be/vLmuDmd9Ymk?t... [youtu.be]
This is exactly where we're headed, only it's almost now, not 500 years like Idiocracy or 700 years like my example, WALL-E
Nah, don't be so cynical. I'm sure those clever billionaires can find a way to teach school children how recurrent lexicogrammatical realisations give the impression of a coherent underlying rule-governed structural system but are no more than form-meaning pairings across a culturally-driven complex adaptive social semiotic system, & that's why AI LLMs give us the impression that they can think & interact meaningfully with us while at the same time being stupider than that horse, Clever Hans, that t
How abuot (Score:5, Insightful)
learning math, reading and writing first? Good luck teaching a diffusion model to kids to who can't put two words together.
Re: How abuot (Score:1)
This.
Teach them to read, write, do math and think. Start there.
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Why narrow it to just "low income" kids? Middle and high income kids often don't know how to think either. It's partly why they grow up to believe pundit trolls and fake news at face value.
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1. They get a lot of good press about helping low income kids
2. These kids learn to depend on AI to do their school work like everyone knew would happen and will have no real programming skills when they graduate
3. MS can complain that the US education system is failing by using these kids in distorted statistics of failure
4. MS requests more work visas from other countries to 'fill the void' the US system created.
5.???
6. Profit!!
PS Didja think it would be only three steps? It's Microsoft after all...
Re: How abuot (Score:1)
I didn't say anything about income kids.
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The point being, it is confusing to some but, all levels of students are in the same building. That includes students lacking academic skills and students that are excelling, and yes, programming.
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Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - now with telemetry! (Score:2)
1) Microsoft and Google are in a headlong race to "embrace and extend" the US education system. They are doing everything they legally can to become the platform upon which education happens. In addition to the long-running user-lockin from habituating young people to "the blue e icon is the Internet" or "my school email is Gmail" or "any device more complicated than a Chromebook is scary", in the data-harvesting/telemetry era it gives them access to millions and millions of users as they go about their dai
So those kids cant Read, but they can learn AI? (Score:2, Insightful)
They *have* to... (Score:1)
So that someone eventually figures out what is going on in the AI models they managed to bungle together from stacks of code from the internet. This is a cry for help...
Follow the money. (Score:2)
AI education = education w/o teachers? (Score:2)
Sounds like some cheap way of trying to get AI to replace teachers in low-income schools...hmmm....maybe....
You might as well try tracking the (Score:2)
The solution for this is well understood but unsexy and boring as hell. Kids from those backgrounds need tech-school style training. Basic but solid reading, writing, arithmetic, computer and civics, as well as basic, time management and life-choice and people skil
Neal (Score:2)
Handwringing (Score:2)
there's a lot of handwringing about whether artificial-intelligence tools are appropriate for school.
Dear Bloomberg editors: That's not how you do unbiased journalism. Language like that is a deliberate effort to portray those who have reservations about the validity of AI tools in education as being whiny luddites, and we're not buying it. But I'm sure your contract with MicroGoogleOpenAISoft required you to go with that wording, so I suppose you had no choice if you wanted to earn whatever they're paying you.
WordPerfect vs MS Office (Score:2)
Basic skills for being a wage-slave is the point of public education. I'll also accept vocational training in schools, when it contributes to a nationally-recognized certificate/competency. The blurb indicates the former goal is intended. Microsoft and Google have demanded a narrow vocational skill (coding) be taught as a basic skill, which is counter to the purpose of public education. This may be aligning corporate values with public-education values but I am cynical.
It's WordPerfect and MS Office a
Other problems are more important (Score:2)
A word to corporations... (Score:3)
Get your grimy paws the FUCK off our schools! They aren't your one-stop solution for indoctrinating your next generation of compliant worker drones / mindless over-consumers.
The misguided dolts that stormed the Capitol in January 2021 had the right idea but chose the wrong target. They should have crashed into the corporate head offices of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. and headed straight for the c-suites. It's too bad the security in those buildings is probably better than it was in Washington.
Yes, I'm exaggerating for effect - but it's not a huge exaggeration. This tail-wagging-the-dog shit needs to stop.
important (Score:2)
This is important because in some underserved communities the best path through wealth is via ransomware attack.
Opinion (Score:1)