Debating About AI: An Easy Path to AI Awareness and Basic Literacy

If you are an organization committed to AI literacy, consider sponsoring some debate topics and/or debates next year and expose thousands of students to AI literacy.

Last week was another busy week for AI —

Meta dropped the first two versions of Llama3 -8B and -70B and integrated free generative AI into all of their applications. It’s not a huge deal in that it’s just another model that is competitive with ChatGPT4, but it’s another open-source model that is trained on the entire internet (15 trillion tokens and the entire dataset is now freely available online) that you also can download and run on your computer. If you have the skills, you can even run it on your phone. Using Llama 3, Groq can generate 800 tokens per second output!

More significantly from a user perspective, you can access it for free at meta.ai and on Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads. AI is now embedded and ubiquitous.

Llama 400B is expected to be released within the next 6 months. Meta has spent $30 billion developing these LLMs.

Boston Dynamics released a new robot, the all-electric Atlas. It has a wide range of motion and can stand up completely from a prone position. The head turns 180 degrees toward the camera while the robot walks backward. Nvidia’s Jim Fan predicts that within a decade there will be more robots than iPhones.

Microsoft released VASA-1, which makes photos talk and sing, enabling it to deep fake a person with one photo and audio track.

Social Science Automation. Harvard and MIT scientists suggested an approach for automatically generating and testing, in silico, social scientific hypotheses.

AI “dogfights.” The US military released information on its first AI-flown dogfight against a human pilot.

MIT hosted Imagination in Action. Via a recorded video, Lex Fridman included personalized LLMs that retain your preferences, real-time speech-to-speech AI, and humanoid robots as 5 things he was excited about for 2024.

AI Agents (Beginners Guide). Individuals can build their own non-code Agents on Google Vertex. CMU released a new AgentKit that requires more technical knowledge.

Discussion of Agents is everywhere, and a comprehensive report on the ethics of AI agents was released. As agents become capable of autonomous action, not only will there be disruptive economic effects, but there will be an acceleration of security and malicious use concerns. Agents will be anthropomorphized, speaking fluent human language (see hume.ai) users and simulating empathy/emotional connections that will build bonds with users, including children through IoT-connected toys. This will leave users vulnerable to persuasion and manipulation.

Scalable technological advances. Scaling AI advances in a way that enables societal-wide adoption of what may become AGI-level technologies will require breakthroughs in architecture. Innovative alternatives such as Groq’s Language Processing Units (LPUs) and Liquid AI’s architectures both represent work in that regard.

That’s a lot for one week, but that’s just the major developments. The world is changing and more will experience the change as AI continues to advance and is embedded in the application layer.

Our students will enter adulthood in a world that is dramatically different from our own, and it’s time to start helping students to think and prepare for that uncertain word. As Joe McBreen, the Assistant Superintendent for Innovation at the St. Vrain Valley School Districted, noted:

I think we're ethically and morally compelled to prepare our kids for a competitive future, where they not only are aware of AI but they're empowered with next-level exposure and experiences so that they can confidently live in this world... That begins today.

Educators have begun to recognize the importance of AI literacy for students, but it has been a struggle to get AI literacy programs off the ground. Some schools underestimate the significance of the change AI will bring. Different stakeholders, including educators, policymakers, and industry experts, have varying perspectives on the essential components of AI literacy. Educators face challenges in determining how to effectively incorporate AI literacy concepts into their existing lesson plans and assessments. There is a shortage of qualified instructors with the necessary expertise to teach AI literacy, particularly in primary and secondary education settings, and, in some instances, there is a shortage of curriculum.

But one simple solution to helping students build awareness of AI and related issues is to have them debate about it.

This weekend, I took my students to a debate tournament that featured the topic --

Resolved: Teachers should integrate generative AI in their teaching and learning.

The topic is simple but raises an issue that students can connect with.

While helping my students prepare and judging debates, I saw students demonstrate an understanding of many key issues and controversies.

These included—

*AI writing assessment/grading
*Bias
*Bullying
*Cognitive load
*Costs of AI systems
*Declining test scores
*Deep fakes
*Differentiation
*Energy consumption
*Hallucinations
*Human-to-human connection
*Inequality and inequity in access
*Neurodiversity
*Personalized learning
*Privacy
*Regulation (lack thereof)
*The future of work and unemployment
*Saving teachers time
*Soft skills
*Standardized testing
*Student engagement
*Teacher awareness and AI training; training resource trade-offs
*Teacher crowd-out
*Transparency and explainability
*Writing detectors (students had an exaggerated sense of the workability of these tools).

Since the students were debating — presenting speeches, rebuttals, participating in questioning periods (including from the judge) — it was easy to see the students demonstrate their knowledge of the issues.

And debating allowed them to develop the communication and metacognitive skills needed to succeed in an AI World. Meeting students from other schools provided them with an opportunity to develop human relationships.

Is this a full “AI literacy” curriculum? No, but it is a good first step toward students developing a basic awareness of the significance of AI and issues related to it, and we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

As I heard one student tell her coach, “I don’t know much about technology. And I didn’t know anything about AI. Now I know a lot.”

Special thanks to Deano Pape and the Ronald Reagan Great Communicator Series for helping foster both AI literacy and debate skills in hundreds of students.

If you are an organization committed to AI literacy, consider sponsoring some debate topics and/or debates next year and expose thousands of students to AI literacy. There are more than 100,000 debaters in the US, and if you sponsored a debate topic about AI then 100,000 students will develop some significant AI literacy; and that would probably be in the range of 50-100 hours worth.