Over the past two decades, innovations powered by artificial intelligence (AI) have extended into nearly all facets of human experience. Our ethnographic research suggests that while young people sense they can't “trust” AI, many are not sure how it works or how much control they have over its growing role in their lives. In this study, we attempt to answer the following questions: 1) What can we learn about young people's understandings of AI when they produce media with and about it? 2) What are the design features of an ethics-centered pedagogy that promotes STEM engagement via AI? To answer these questions, we co-developed and documented three projects at YR Media, a national network of youth journalists and artists who create multimedia for public distribution. Participants are predominantly youth of color and those contending with economic and other barriers to full participation in STEM fields. Findings showed that by creating a learning ecology that centered the cultures and experiences of its learners while leveraging familiar tools for critical analysis, youth deepened their understanding of AI. Our study also showed that providing opportunities for youth to produce ethics-centered Interactive stories interrogating invisibilized AI functionalities, and to release those stories to the public, empowered them to creatively express their understandings and apprehensions about AI.
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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2024
AMBY: A development environment for youth to create conversational agents
Conversational AIs such as Alexa and ChatGPT are increasingly ubiquitous in young people’s lives, but these young users are often not afforded the opportunity to learn about the inner workings of these technologies. One of the most powerful ways to foster this learning is to empower youth to create AI that is personally and socially meaningful to them. We have built a novel development environment, AMBY–‘‘AI Made By You’’–for youth to create conversational agents. AMBY was iteratively designed with and for youth aged 12–13 through contextual inquiry and usability studies. AMBY is designed to foster AI learning with features that enable users to generate training datasets and visualize conversational flow. We report on results from a two-week summer camp deployment, and contribute design implications for conversational AI authoring tools that empower AI learning for youth.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2048480
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10497837
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 38
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 2212-8689
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 100618
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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