EASIE AI - For learners, parents, and teachers [Issue 3]

Welcome, cutting-edge educators and aspirational parents

Introducing your no-nonsense EASie guide to using AI to support your kids’ learning and growing your own AI literacy

Today, we’ll cover:

• AI Video Generation - free

• AI Beginners Jargon—Automation Bias

• AI Adepts Jargon—Parameters

• Good prompting—Context

• AI Supported Language learning

• AI News

Reading Time 4 Mins

Be a film director!

It has been a standout week for AI Video Generators. Open AI previously announced Sora, but that was closed to the public. Now, you can try some video generation for free!

Step-by-step

• Go to Dream Machine from LumaLabs

• Click JOIN in the top right

• Sign into the website with your Google account

• Enter your prompt. Most examples are less than twenty words and generate only a few seconds of videos, so go for a mood rather than an epic!

• Wait up to five minutes.

• Get out the popcorn!

Teaching/Learning Use

As a teacher, I wanted a video of King Henry VIII beckoning the viewer to come closer. It would be a great opener to a lesson topic on the Tudors. He came out looking a bit angrier than I hoped, and there’s some slight weirdness in the background, but it is very impressive.

Always be careful

Safety warning.

There’s always a risk on the internet. When you want to try the latest AI technology, remember that there will be those who want to take advantage of a surge in demand.

You’ll sometimes find fake sites that appear to be the latest AI Video Generation sites, for example, but once you enter them, you’ll find a bombardment of permission requests and fake malware warnings.

Be careful to use the correct links, especially if you are going through a search. It is safer to go through a reputable source as the unique names of AI tools can make it difficult to spot fake ones.

AI Jargon - Learning

We’ll help you increase your knowledge of AI by explaining a beginner and advanced concept each week.

For AI beginners—We all start somewhere.

Automation Bias

Automation bias is a tendency for people to over-rely on automated systems and ignore their own judgment or other sources of information. When faced with a decision, if an automated system provides a recommendation or performs a task, people tend to trust it too much, assuming it is always correct.

• Over-reliance on spell-checkers is an example of this automation bias

• Dealing with automation bias is part of AI literacy but most LLM’s minimum age of 13+ makes it difficult to support younger learners in building the skills they’ll need

• Google and Anthropic have made moves towards introducing safe[r] AI that could allow kids to use it more and begin to build their AI literacy.

For AI Adepts—Next level AI Knowledge!

Parameters

Large Language Models are often described by the number of parameters they have. Each parameter is like an adjustable setting that helps the LLM determine the next word in its output after a prompt. Parameter count is not the only indication of an AI’s power, but the more it has, the more capable it tends to be.

• Low-parameter models are useful because they require less power and less training than high-parameter models—they can still be effective at focused tasks.

• Many AI companies don’t reveal the parameter counts, which leads to researchers having to estimate them.

• The latest ChatGPT 4 LLM is estimated to have 100 trillion parameters

• Google’s Gemini Nano designed to run on phones is around 3 billion parameter

Prompt Guide

Good prompting practice for you. Learning opportunities for your kids

Context

Good writers think about their audience. Your AI doesn’t know your audience until you tell it. Always provide context in conjunction with last week’s prompting tip of clarity.

• Tell the AI how you will use the output (email, worksheet).

• Say who the audience is (3rd grade learners, teacher).

• Communicate the level of expertise or lack of it. (‘Explain like I am five…’).

Learning opportunity

Seeing how AI changes its output when you change the context is a great way of showing kids how they can adapt one piece of writing for different audiences without having to write multiple examples.

AI For Practice

Solitary learning is not always possible. Many of us aspire to become multilingual and dream of having conversations in other languages, but speaking is the most difficult aspect to practise because we need somebody with whom to converse.

Pros

• AI-supported apps provide always-ready practice sessions and tutoring

• They can listen and converse in natural language

• They never get bored of the simple conversations new learners need to practise.

Cons

• Young kids should not use AI language apps because of the risk of inappropriate content

• Conversations naturally lead us to open up, which could result in us divulging data we did not mean to provide.

• Many AI language models don’t do well at pronunciation outside of English—particularly tonal languages.

AI News

Your one-stop, in-brief AI newsstand

• Google announced it would bring generative AI to teens through educational accounts. The announcement at ISTE put an emphasis on AI literacy, including this supporting Responsible AI video.

• For many people, ChatGPT is AI, but there are alternatives with compelling features. Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic slightly edges ahead of the latest ChatGPT in some tests, and they both trade blows with different features.

• Reality and virtual has become more blurry this week after reports that Meta is labelling real photos as Made with AI. And a real photo of a headless Flamingo won an AI Photo competition.