Featured Session: How to Support Resilient Youth in an AI World

Speaker 1 00:00 Rather than focusing on the question of whether AI should should be used in education, we have to ask the question, how do we ensure AI strengthens young people's capacity to think, relate and thrive, drawing from the recent Brookings Report titled a new direction for students in an AI world, prosper, prepare, protect. Our speakers will explore what it truly means to support resilient youth in an AI saturated world. Please join me in welcoming Rebecca Winthrop, Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution to the south by stage so good Speaker 2 00:41 to be here. I am very excited to share with you what we found. And as an education expert, I've been thinking a lot about this, but also as a parent, I have two young kids, and I probably every day think what you all think if you're a parent, which is, how do we protect and prepare our kids for this crazy, generative AI world we're in? And that was one of the main questions that we had up Brookings, and we did a really big deep dive around the world, 50 countries, hundreds of studies. Talked to 500 students, parents, teachers, technologists, really asking this question about, what do kids need, and are we on the right track? And one of our major motivations was we've seen this movie before. It happened in social media. When parents, teachers, educators, coaches were not at the table, and we want to make sure that we don't repeat it. And so what I'm going to share with you today is our five big takeaways that we learned in doing this research. The first one is, it's so confusing. It's very confusing. Generative AI, first off, we found that the lines were totally blurred. Kids are accessing generative AI all the time, everywhere. The lines between technology for education, technology for entertainment, technology for communication have been all mixed up. One of the students I spoke to is a high school student here in the US said, well, it has to back up GDP, but it's no big deal. We just use social media. We go on to our AI friends on social media, meta, AI, snap AI, we talk to them about our day or how annoying our parents are, and then we take a picture of our mouth homework and say, Please do it for me. And it does. So we know that also, there's a lot of good things and a lot of bad things. The orange here are the bad things. The Blue are the good thing is a whole crazy mix of things that generative AI can either benefit students learning and development or hurt it. So how can it help? We did find that generative AI can help kids learn and enrich their ability to develop independent learning skills and deep learning. So for example, if AI is embedded in virtual reality, it can have a huge potential, very possibly at the moment, but it has a huge potential to really help kids learn in totally different ways that can really advance their their learning. We also know that it can really help neurodivergent kids. One of the most moving examples, I like to shout out is kids with Aphasia who have trouble communicating. Jenny and I creating synthetic copies of their voice, and they can all of a sudden communicate with peers and teachers in the classroom. Incredible teachers. Teachers benefit. Not only do they love the admin support, which they need desperately because they're overworked everywhere. But assessment Unknown Speaker 04:04 can be incredibly Speaker 2 04:07 more nuanced with Gen AI really figuring out where kids just get stuck, and then we can certainly use Gen AI to help adapt lessons to where kids are at again, another example that I found so moving is diaspora. Afghan teachers using Gen AI to make little mini WhatsApp based lessons and sending them to girls in Afghanistan were hard and banned for schooling by the Taliban from during secondary school and at home, they're staying in school with little, tiny, adaptive lessons. So incredible stuff. But we also know that it can be really bad. Bad is the technical term. It can diminish learning when used very widely, the benefits are really from narrow AI use, strategic can be very, very troubled. One of the things that I get, like, my head wants to explode when somebody comes up and says, but isn't just a chatbot, like a calculator? Are we just, like, overreacting? You educators, like, Get with the program. Like, no, it's not like it at all. The calculator offloaded arithmetic and a few a big slice of mathematics, if an AI cap off is like a calculator, it would do math. It would also do English. It would also do physics and chemistry and biology and history and social studies and poetry and music and art history, and would take the SAP for you, and it would give you relationship advice, and it would accurately fix it, stop using it is not like a calculator at all, and the cognitive offloading where kids are using it to do their painting for them is dangerous If you repeat it time and time again, kids are not wiring their brains to develop the critical thinking skills we need, as my colleague now Johnson says, brains wired the way they are used when when in this critical developmental period, we're also really worried about the social and emotional implications and see, yep. Wait a minute, what happened? Did I have such implications up there? Nope, okay, well, we are, but I'm on the wrong slide. The other piece we're worried about is narrowing ideas. This is a study by Adam green and his colleagues that has tracked 1000s and 1000s of high school seniors writing their college applications. Now every little.on this chart is a unique idea. When kids write without AI, they have many, many, many different unique ideas. When they write with AI, their ideas all kind of cluster in the same area. They're all kind of telling the same story. It really hurts kids creativity. Okay, here we go. Social, emotional development. So I'm sure you all know about AI, companions and friends, one in three teens in the US say they like talking to my friend equally or more than a human being, and they're designed to agree with you at all times. Now, if kids are developing their social emotional muscles by being agreed with all the time, how are they going to take feedback when they're make a mistake of learning in a classroom. Learning is about making a mistake. How are they going to be resilient when things don't go their way, and how are they going to stand up to the very real and very dangerous, although a minority of kids certainly event when chatbots manipulate kids to self harm and traction rook and potentially take their own life, which is very, very sad. The other piece that Speaker 3 08:26 is worrisome is they can amplify bias. This is interesting research with Punya Mishra and others. If you are a seventh grader and you put the same essay into a chatbot, and this was chatgpt, this research and said, give me feedback. I want to improve my essay. If chatgpt knows you like rap music or if you like classical music, the kid has classic likes classical music will get a full grade level, higher critique and suggestions on how to improve their essay. It also reduces trust. This is one of the things that worries me most, the instructional core, which is the relationship between learning content, teachers, students and their parents, and the interaction between them. That is the beating heart of what how learning happens in schools. And you need trusting relationships. Human beings have evolved our entire lifetime and species to be in relationship with others and to learn in relationships, and when you don't have trust, I'm really worried about what that will do for the ability for two kids to sustain a really positive learning experience. So those are the bad things, Speaker 2 09:44 and really because they are kind of a different nature than the benefits. We say at the moment that the risks are overshadowing the benefits, as AI is currently implemented and has been deployed, and remember, it showed up to schools. It wasn't invited. It's like a first ed tech. You don't have to procure necessarily. It just popped up software. And one of the things that worries me the most is this underlying demotivation. So many kids we talked to said, you know, you know the jackpots, they can do everything. Why am I here in school? Why am I running like what am i Careful? What is my role as a human being? My colleague and I, Jenny Anderson, wrote a book last year called The disengaged team, helping kids learn better, feel better and live better. And what we found was that it wasn't that kids in school were either engaged or disengaged. They showed up in four different modes of learning. Kids in resistor mode were avoiding and disrupting their learning. They were not engaged. Kids in passenger mode, many of whom had straight A's it's hard to detect, might have liked going to school, but they are not at all interested in what they're learning, and they're doing the bare minimum to get by. And then you've got kids in achiever mode. They're trying to get the gold star and everything put in front of them. They're quite fragile learners, actually, because when it doesn't go well, they will melt. But really what they're interested in is the end goal, the grade, not the learning journey. And AI is great for cheating on that lots of cheating kids in the cheaper mode, and then kids in explore mode. These are the kids where Curiosity meets drive. They become unstoppable. They care about the learning journey, not just the end goal. They're incredibly resilient. It doesn't go great. They get back up because they're motivated, interested and engaged. And what I worry about is unwide ai use creating a ton of kids in passenger mode already. We know that about half the kids in high school say they're regularly in passenger mode, and less than 4% of kids say they're regularly in sport. And what is Gen AI going to do if we don't turn the tide? And that, again, is why we say the risks really overshadow the benefits. But luckily, it is not too late by any means. We this is early days in this technology. We can shift course to focus on the benefits and mitigate the risks, and we know that what we're going to have to do is help kids get to explore those. Those are the kids who are using AI to go faster and further and deepen their learning and really creative ways we have we recommend three things. First is shift how we do teaching and learning, support curiosity, foster and model the thrill of learning as parents. If you're an educator and you're assigning a piece of homework that can be hacked by chatgpt domiciled. Prepare kids. It's time to teach kids about the online world. They really need exposure to this, and this doesn't need more screen time, but it's about ethics and what it's good for, and how to create what they want with it. And then, of course, we need safeguards on the commercial products to protect children. There's a range of resources that you're welcome to use and download. We have@brookings.edu our report you can download. We translated the report. We're beginning. We're halfway through translating them into tip sheets for parents, because we found that parents are not at the table in this discussion very much. We have our book, and I have a LinkedIn newsletter, and so please, you know, reach out if you're at all interested. And now, most importantly, I am very happy to welcome to the stage our three fabulous speakers, the three Ms, Martin Miriam Speaker 4 13:42 and holo Speaker 2 13:52 is the CEO of Hello Sun tonight, Lisa media company and doing a ton of cool work with Gen Z and Schneider is head of learning initiatives for Google Deep Mind and doing lots of interesting creative stuff like peer cup. And Martin Kai is the CEO and Executive Chairman of everway, a really amazing assistive technology company. So all of you welcome. Thank you for being here. Ask each of you to sort of your reactions to these report findings, but Mary, first, I want to turn to you because you are one of the representing one of the AI frontier Speaker 3 14:38 labs, and I want to ask about children's safety like this is a real concern. You've heard about it with Hawaii, I use one of recommendations and safeguards. So how are you addressing this? How is the living mind thinking Speaker 5 14:51 about this? Yeah, it's a great place to start, because we obviously can't talk about how children can thrive and grow and flourish in an online world if they are not first and foremost safety. So it's a great place to start. And for those of you who are not familiar with Google, define it is a frontier AI lab with a research orientation, and our mission is around building AI for the benefit, responsibly for the benefit of humanity. So this piece is really critical to how we approach this space, I think for us at DeepMind and Google more broadly, this has to be table stakes, and it has been since the beginning of us in producing technology into classroom environments. Our approach was really to think about AI purpose built for learning education. So we we've been working for years on an effort we call learn LM, which is actually infusing pedagogy into the Java model and thinking about teaching and learning first and not secondary. So as a result of that, it really gave Unknown Speaker 15:56 us the ability to infuse these Speaker 5 15:57 safeguards from the outset and not kind of cling it on as an afterthought or an add on. We could probably take the entire time talking about some of the things that we're doing, but for the sake of timeliness and to make sure we actually get to the good stuff, I will just name a few of the key efforts that we do in the space. So first and foremost is we adhere to all regulations, standards, policies that that are set in place. So COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, FERPA Family Education Rights Privacy Act, any use within a school setting or school account, is all enterprise grade data protection. So all of that basically means data safe. It's private, it is secure. The second thing that we do when we and are you training? Unknown Speaker 16:42 No, it stays secure, but are you Unknown Speaker 16:45 trained? It is not used. Speaker 5 16:47 So any under 18 account is not used to train a lots and any use in the school account same. The second thing that we do is we actually purpose filled, bespoke, age appropriate experiences. So this includes technology we're working on to auto and for age and actually provide additional layers of safety, filtering, content safeguards if a user is under 18. The other thing that we do, and I think this one is really, really critical, especially as it reflects in your report, is giving parental supervised controls and granular tools so that adults, parents, educators, guardians, can actually supervise the use and dictate what the their child's experience with AI looks like, and that's in a classroom environment or home. You know, we are really actively doing a lot of research in this space to inform our approach moving space. Things are changing all the time, so we are actively pursuing research, speaking directly to parents, to learners themselves, industry experts, child safety organizations to adjust and continue evolving this space. The other thing we do is really rigorous testing. So we do something called adversarial red teaming, which is not as scary as it sounds, but basically bring specialists, internal and external, to actually try to break our safety safeguards. And what that does is it expose gaps vulnerabilities, and we can use that information to actually strengthen and improve the resilience of these systems and tools. I will say we view this as a team sport. It is truly multidisciplinary, not just a bunch of technologists in a room being like, these are what the tools should be. So working really closely, hand to hand, cognitive neuroscientists, developmental psychologists, child safety experts, parents, families, policymakers, really helping inform what these tools should look like, the kinds of resources, training material students and parents need to learn how to use them responsibly and safely and actually maximize their Speaker 2 18:52 benefit. All right. Well, thank you. That was, that Unknown Speaker 18:55 was the and that's just, that's a very helpful Speaker 2 18:58 starting point. Martin, I want to turn to you. You have invested your whole life in assistive technology for neurodivergent populations. I'd be super curious your reactions to the findings of the report, and you know what you're thinking about in your work. Speaker 6 19:16 So I broadly agree with the findings of the report. There are two, I think, two big risks, and then I'm a huge optimist about AI and education and the impact they can have, particularly in our target audience, young people, neurodiverse young people, kids with dyslexia and ADHD and autism. The risks first, let me kind of cover off the risk. It is well known that learning comes from a little bit of cognitive struggle. If we outsource the struggle, we don't really learn. There was a recent study that was done by the OECD that had kids do, well, yeah, kids, they were teenagers, and they had them write an essay. Control study, 50 kids wrote an essay with the help of chatgpt. Three days later, 85% of the kids who use chatgpt couldn't remember what they were not the case with the kids who thought deeply and learn about so I think that as we create AI enabled or enriched learning experiences, we've got to keep the cover of struggle in there for the kid, but I think it'd be ultra personalized, probably the things I'm very excited about. And the second thing is, you know, kids have access to this AI, even if the school completely blocks it. They've got on their phone. And my real concern with that is, you know, it doesn't respond differently to me as a 55 year old than I'm sort of like an April over an angle, over general and I think, but I just think we need to make sure that we are thinking about the kids stage of emotional development, and that we're not exposing things that could potentially be damaging or taken appropriate for the range. But the optimistic stuff is just incredible. So we do, you know, we work for kids with dyslexia and ADHD and so on, and our strapline is to help everyone understand and be understood. And kids with dyslexia, if you give them, like 500 words of text, a huge number of them will just switch off and disengage. It's too much. To mark them, but AI can rewrite that content in a few seconds. Lower the cognitive load everyone's covered with profiles a little bit different. Some people like bullet tests. Some people like, you know, emojis scatter through the text with keywords involved. Some Speaker 3 21:56 Thank you. Maureen, over to you curious. You know, you work with Gen Z all the time. You run a media company. What are your reactions to these findings, and how are you thinking about it in your work? Yeah, I Speaker 7 22:09 think I'll send her myself first around the fact that so those of you that don't know, hell of sunshine, it's rooted for their students. Media company that we started about 10 years ago. I'm CEO of the company, and in the last couple of years, we were doing a lot of research about what was happening in the world of Gen Z consumers, and what were they thinking, and how were they feeling, not just about media, but of culture, and of how the world is changing and evolving. We built a Gen Z board, a board of Gen Z women who ultimately started to tell us about the world around them and how they see it and how they perceive it. Ironically, one of the young women on our board is a woman who is an AIS statistician. She's an incredible college student who truly is building an ethics code that lots of big media companies are really interested in learning from her. We're lucky enough to have her on the board, and we have lots of other incredible women on our board who were telling us that they don't feel represented in the world of media. They don't feel their perspectives, don't feel represented, and they know that the world around them is very cautious about AI, but they also knew that they needed to step into AI, because one of the things that we hear so much from this younger generation is how women's voices have never been part of the story, how our company was built around changing the narrative for women and really telling stories with the female perspective at the center. And if you're building and you're applying an AI space, and you're not creating space for women to have the tools and the understanding and the opportunity to learn about it then then we're gonna have another area in the world where we're not gonna be represented, and so. started talking to the mom, and we talked to the to their daughters, these Gen Z women. We did research with light pulse, and we did qualitative research ourselves. And what came back was that this in your study, Rebecca, and what you talked about in your book about, you know, being an achiever mode versus explorer mode, and the energy around, the intensity around I have to understand aI have to be inside the AI zone. But I'm so careful, and I'm so afraid, and I don't know if it's good or bad, and the ecosystem around me is questioning. And so I'm questioning myself, and women tend to question themselves so much more. And so I think that's a risk reward, is something that is such an important conversation to have. But at our company, we launched a brand for Gen z9 months ago, because of the research we did, because of this Gen Z board that told us that we really need to better represent them and give them the space to be himself. And in this the brand is called Sunny. It's largely a community brand that's anchored in experiences, old school, analog experiences, and I think it's super interesting. And I have to say, you know, I'm optimist about AI too. But I should also say I'm a mom. I think my kids, two of my kids, are here tonight, today. They're neurodivergent. I have a daughter who has dyslexia. She's brilliant and incredible. And I've been using AI in our family for a long time because systems are not set up for them, and AI gives you the power to actually create systems for yourself. And I think that we've been thinking about the systems that you could create using AI as the tool, but that the human has to be at the center. And these young girls that we're talking to that we're building with, they want to co create. They want to proceed. They want to collaborate, and they take me the opportunity to sort of build the world that they want the world to be inside AI. And what we're doing is building playbooks for them. We partner with Purdue University, and we built the first community we built inside society was a was a community around how to actually be a builder in the AI space in a careful, thoughtful, human, centered way, and to give them the sort of tools, literacy and learning, to be smart, critically, thinking about the way that you leverage AI. So I think there's risk, I think there's reward. I think there's a balance. And I think we need to create the space for these women to be part of the builder. And so I love the work that you're doing. I love the book that you wrote, and I really do feel like it's our responsibility as a company like sunshine to create that access and that education. Speaker 3 26:29 Great. Thanks. And you mentioned your kids. I we actually all in our panel prep all realize we all have kids. They range from three years old to 24 and so we have we spend most of the time talking about our kids and what we're hearing about what we're hearing about. And so here I wanna, I wanna come to you. There's a question. Please keep sending your questions. I want to get your reaction to the report, but I also want them before Speaker 8 26:55 I'm wearing my glasses. Wanted to see if you could answer this question, Speaker 3 27:00 you know, and maybe wrap it into your reactions, you know, is, is Google working on ways to strengthen critical thinking and avoid providing answers that reinforce the initial ideas of children, students and adults alike? Yeah, great question, Speaker 5 27:14 and it does even my answer. I will just mean that I am parents to very young kids, three and a half and six and a half, where the half is very critical? Yes? So yeah, I do think about this from a different lens, both from a professional and personal standpoint. I think I'll start with the question first, and then get into the report. They do relate. But, yeah, I mean, this is really the ways that we're working on this, I think. And it does come back to echo my initial reaction to the report was, is about intentionality, and so I think maybe the language of narrow use, I think the way that we've approached this is with intention. So I mentioned one LM, which was it's three, three plus years that we've been working on this first as a research project to really determine how to use AI in teaching and learning in ways that honor the effort of learning to your point, so they don't reduce that cognitive struggle, because the effort is the point. And I think we want to make sure that we don't take that away. But it was a really hard challenge. I mean, it is a continuously, really hard challenge, and defined, if you're familiar, we're known for working on tackling really big scientific problems and spaces like biology, physics, protein folding, for example. And many of our researchers are actually saying, you know, figuring out how to use this technology in ways that embed pedagogy into the model itself is actually harder than figuring out how to be the most complex game, which is go. So I think that's a it's stumper, but it is something that we are being really intentional about from the outset. So there what has happened with darnella and the evolution of that is we incubated that as a research project. We worked in really close partnership with pedagogy experts. We have an in house pedagogy team, all learning scientists and many former educators who have spent lots of time in the classroom. And we have expert panels. And work really in close collaboration with with a wide field, and at a certain point, we realized that, and we were doing all kinds of research to assess, you know, is this reducing the amount of effort that students are putting in? Are they not asking follow up questions, trying to find these other proxies to measure the effectiveness and the engagement with the learning process, not the engagement with the tool, necessarily, but the engagement with learning. What this has become now is a mode in Gemini that's called guided learning. And actually what that does is invokes the behavior, basically turns up the pedagogy now of Gemini. So instead of giving you an answer, it will come back with guiding questions. It will come back with ideas, or, you know, maybe having reviewed this picture, that might be, you know, helpful connected concepts. And it really is about maintaining that kind of critical thought and the process, to not remove the effort of learning and to try to keep them in that zone across the development where we know that meaningful learning happens. See, I think that you know, thinking about intentionality as one of the main focus areas that has guided this work, that has added the types of research we do. And overall, in response to the report, I will just do one quick product club. The report is amazing. It's 219, pages. So if you haven't used notebook, LM, this is a great testing actually, just put put the report in. And this is another great way where actually it does critical thinking skills. You can ask questions. It can bring it into multi level experiences. So it can bring it into a diagram. It can do flash cards. It can do all kinds of things to maintain your interest, your curiosity, instead of just giving you an answer of, hey, what do I need to say on this panel with Rebecca, so I don't look dumb. Speaker 3 31:02 I did get someone on your team who was like, I put your report into nano banana. Yeah, one picture, one graphic, and it was pretty good. Like, if you only have two Speaker 2 31:21 minutes, I wanna come to you. I'd be, Speaker 8 31:26 I'm quite interested to know how Gen AI is sort of Speaker 2 31:34 taking your work further, because you've been using technology with neurodivergent learners a day at school or the workforce, somebody having all sorts of dinging going on. Don't worry. Don't be distracted cell phones. So I'm curious, what is the difference that Gen AI brings versus you know, what you could do before? Speaker 6 32:00 So it's Game Changing together. So you know, previously, if we took a conventional algorithmic computing approach to try to summarize text, it didn't really do a good job. It did an okay job, but it didn't do a great job. And if you try to lower the cognitive load of text by taking high rooting edge words and replacing with low rooting edge words, it's plenty. It doesn't flow. The Living doesn't flow. But generally, I can take the text we've got, we've got this kind of cognitive lens. Could you be like everyone? We sort of think everyone's cognitive profile is different. And much like I have a prescription glasses here, I can, I can have that content transformed into the cognitive load that's appropriate for me, Speaker 3 32:45 and before, you couldn't, you couldn't do that because it wasn't enough tailored, because you that's what, you know. My son's dyslexic. He's used your products actually in school through reading, right? And that's what it was doing. Speaker 6 32:57 Yeah, there are so many things you know, like we're a conversational species. So one of the best things that you can do for dyslexic kids is just out loud. Four years ago, text to speech sounded really boring, kind of monotonous, and now, with AI voices, it sounds super human. Actually, you can phone your teacher's voice and have a teacher, you know, read you. There's a ton of critical stuff in each of vertical stuff we can do, but that the lowering the curve of the load is actually one of the most important things. There was a guy called David who did a study years ago on this kind of summarization, and he found that, you know, kids, people just disengage when they're faced with a wall of text. If you provide them with a summary, many of them will continue to engage. And what we can do now, instead of just saying whether we want to reduce this by two thirds, you can actually, if you want, you can keep all the text there, but just lower the cognitive load so you can make it easier, not shorter, and you can enrich the text with images. For key, you know, for keywords. It's transformational. It's like it is completely transformational. And to be able to take a body of text and turn it into a spider diagram that someone can then edit and, you know, transform into something else, conventional computer, it's been transformational. Okay, very cool. Speaker 3 34:18 There's a question I want to come to you with it, Maureen, but we can all, we can all jump in on it. All right, where did it go? It was no, no, important question, and they moved. You guys have all your questions. Okay, I'm going to recreate it? Oh, no, there it is. Okay. Alex, your question, do you believe in a mix of school policies around creating specific, no tech spaces and classes that allow for analog engagement with students pen, you know, pen and paper, you know, alongside presumably. The question is, tech spaces? Now I really want to hear from you, Marie on this, and then we can all dive in, because, you know, Gen Z is sort of famously navigating this tension. There's a lot of, you know, we want Cafe nights, no technology around. We want to connect in person. We want, you know, CD players. Unknown Speaker 35:16 I remember that I'm so old. Yeah. Speaker 7 35:21 What do you think? Yeah, I think that. I think that Gen Z, the younger generation, the apples, will be the same. I think they're actually driving this resurgence of in real life experiences and real human connectivity, because they're craving that we're seeing what we call inside hell of sunshine, the analog rebellion. These young women in particular, who we're talking to. They want to go out and meet with other people. They are signing up to actually use their hands and craft again. They they want to listen to stories and tell stories with other people in rooms with them. And they're actually we have this tagline internally about what we're doing with sign or Gen Z brand, and it's about slowing their scroll. You know that we don't, they don't want to be completely off digital media. As a matter of fact, most of these young girls are being told, you know, to apply to colleges, you need to be following a school to be able to tell the story about why you want to go there. The systems that are set up for them, they should be engaging in digital but what they're asking us for, what they're what they're craving is the opportunity to be more intentional with their time, so that when they step outside the digital ecosystem that they're in, they're able to be the best version of themselves and to be more joyful. And many people my age old, who grew up in the Unknown Speaker 36:36 80s, we want to reveal our first CD player. People think that Speaker 7 36:43 the reason this generation is so into everything 90s is because of the nostalgia factor and the fact that it's cozy and comfy and it just feels like everything was so simple back then. And that's a little bit of it, but a lot of it is that you had more agency back then than this generation has right now, and they want the agency, and part of that agency is being able to figure out who they are and to be more curious. They're craving the opportunity to be more critical in the way that they think about the world around them. And, you know, I'm just so optimistic about this younger generation, because I really do believe that the they want to go out in the world and be together again, and they're going to create that space. And I think that, you know, AI is going to give them the opportunity to be smart and critical thinking about the way they use it, but really give them the opportunity to go out and be more joyful and to have more fun and to be in the real world. Unknown Speaker 37:34 I want to Yes, yes, please. So I think there's something Speaker 5 37:36 really interesting about that sense of balance. It feels like the conversation has become so binary of it is AI or teacher, it is AI or pen and paper, and I think the conversation shifting from either or to both and is a really healthy conversation. I love the analog rebellion, because I think it's pushing back to find dialog, which isn't to say that all learning can happen with AI, absolutely not. I don't think anybody would agree with that. But I think there are pointed, intentional uses where it can be really additive. It can really enhance the experience. It can give time back to educators to reinvest in their students, building a human connection that is so inherent to where learning happens. The person to student to student, the student to their teacher, the kid to their parent. And so I think that the shift around either or to be both, and would be a really powerful place to find that. And it does come back to intentionality, being really clear about when, how, why you are using a specific tool in the same way you would do with any other tool at your disposal. AI is very powerful tool, but it doesn't change the way that you approach when and how and why you use it. Speaker 7 38:50 I'll just say one more thing. When we built the playbook that I mentioned earlier in the community that we built around empowering young girls with AI, we built a physical, printed playbook where we were teaching these girls how to be intentional about the way that they're spending time in AI. We were teaching them literacy, and they had to actually write down what they were feeling, what they were observing in this playbook as they were playing with the AI tools. And that was creating a space Speaker 5 39:16 for them to actually really think about what they're using it for, and how are Speaker 7 39:20 they using it? Are they thinking in the right way about it? And I do think that they loved it. They craved it. And as a matter of fact, some of the girls in our advisory board said we really want to write letters to each other more. And we're building actually against the health extension. We're actually building books and tools for them, physical products, because they told us that's what they wanted from us, which I think varies back what you said, Mary. Speaker 3 39:42 I come to you on this question, but first I want to give my two cents, because I have a specific question communicate before chatgpt showed up in 2022 it's intermediated by a screen. And you know, a number of the engines I interviewed, there was one young boy, I think he was 15 or something, and he's like, Unknown Speaker 41:20 Yiddish, well, what like have you not spoken to her? He said, Well, what if I say something and then she Speaker 3 41:29 says something right back right then, and I don't have the time to think Speaker 2 41:33 about what to say back so already, sort of, this is a generation that has, you know, at least less and less in person communication. So how do we help Speaker 3 41:46 schools be as human as possible? Is, I think, really important. That doesn't mean taking all technology, all technology out of it. They found Bella Bell cell phone bands, but we want them to be able to learn the tools of the trade and how it can help them. But it's not necessarily all day long at all, intermediate in tech. Now, the question I have for you, Mark, the reason why I wanted to tee this up for you is it gets more complicated when you have neurodivergent kids who do need a tech interface, right? Like, how do you handle that? Like, is that? Speaker 6 42:17 So I don't know. It's about funding at all. My daughter is dyslexic, and has really benefited to my eye, but also in 2016 I came home from a conference in California and told her not to do social media. I thought it was a bad idea. Digital Footprint would be there forever, and she would say embarrassing things when she was 14 and neither of my kids use social media. Never had look for my daughter. She's like a mysterious person. She's, I think she's got the she she has just found a balance, and she uses it when it's your soul and doesn't want, doesn't want to go. And she very often she can read, but when she reads silently, she doesn't remember. And sometimes she uses text experience very often, she just reads a lot, yeah, yeah. She just, she's quite a balance. My My son is 21 and he's a software engineer, esthetic software engineer. And AI has been a graduate this summer. And he also makes between thinking he really understands and sees what powerful it, how much is going to change the world. And that some days he says, some days, I just wish this wasn't a thing, because his, you know, he knows that next year, there's no way he's going to be better than, you know, Jacqueline or something. Unknown Speaker 44:00 Working with so forth, and the Speaker 2 44:03 demotivation thing is real. Yeah, purpose. What's our role? What am I here for? Why? And a parent told me the other the other day, I'll do a lot of talks to schools and parents educators. Speaker 3 44:15 And she said, you know, what can I tell my daughter every this was in Silicon Valley, every day we drive, I drive her to school. She's 10, and we drive back by a big billboard that says, Don't hire people. Hire our AI agent, like, like, what is the people. Well, what's super Speaker 7 44:43 interesting, and what we're seeing is that this younger generation, they were when we first started at this research and stood up this advisory board of young women, it was when school started banning phones and taking them away, and they were disgruntled at birth, and then the conversation shifted to the level of freedom that they feel, and not freedom like I don't have a phone, I don't have to check in Unknown Speaker 45:04 freedom to be themselves, to actually learn who they Unknown Speaker 45:07 are, because they're not actually Speaker 7 45:09 looking for someone else's perspective, who they are and more likes or how social, what your perception is, and then what we've been hearing. And I think this is why we're calling this this rebellion. They started. They started mirroring what was happening in school, in the social environments that they were in, and so they would be going to their friends houses. And what we were finding is it wasn't every friend's house, Speaker 5 46:26 reinforces research we've done too, which is we tell we're telling this narrative that students want different things than we do, but they don't want to lose the effort of learning either. Mom the most part, you know, they want to be able to hold up, to happen and to actually learn and understand. I think we've gone from this age of information, where it's so abundant, to truly now understand, with AI, how we can use that in ways that deepen their understanding and not just give them the dancers, which, you know, some of the research that we've done. It does come back to time, which is, if you think about so, some some research. And we do all kinds of research, ranging from rapid auto evaluations to longitudinal, random principles trials that we're doing globally, because obviously learning contexts are so different. But what we're seeing is we've heard from teachers in Northern Ireland, actually here, that they're able to say almost 10 hours a week. And it's not just the time savings, it's what are they doing, Speaker 3 48:00 so many teachers saying, I really hope my school leader doesn't find out how much time I'm saving, because we're going to Unknown Speaker 48:07 assign the whole double load so Speaker 3 48:08 like we have to all keep an eye on that, it's only going to help teachers if you keep the workload constant. There's a question here for you, Martin, that I wanted to did you want to come in on this? Natalie? Natalie, Natalie, you have a great question, as I'm going to read for the audience as a child psychiatrist, can you provide more specifics on AI and ADHD, given that ADH, given that an ADHD profile, slash brain is naturally wired to struggle with unpertense, yeah. Speaker 6 48:37 So I think this is a really good example, where in the moment, a teacher can use an AI tool to say a kid who is not engaged with math and doesn't prefer math. And you know, people think they used to get stimulated by novelty and interest. And if math the way the math problem is friendly, does not intersect with novels, or they're just they made novels. It's like impossible for them to get engaged in it. It's just like, Well, no, I can't, I can't, I can't do anything. A teacher can say, can you reframe this for a kid who's super interested in hockey or football? And it will it, will make it, will reframe it for them and make it interesting for them, and that like that is one simple thing that a teacher can do to get, you know, kids more engaged. There's a ton of other things as well. You know, kids with ADHD often will see a task get overwhelmed with it, not be able to kind of break it down into some tasks. Speaker 9 49:41 And it's really good at that sub task, breaking those other sub tasks. There's lots and lots of things that lots of things. Again, Martin, Speaker 6 49:50 it's actually super Speaker 7 49:57 interesting, because there's a lot of young women who are telling us that they too, even if they're not neurodivergent, they're feeling overwhelmed, and they have so many things that they have to be able to activate on, or that they're responsible for, they have to do to be able to compete in the world that they're in right now. And they're feeling like what AI is allowing them to do with the way these tools are set up is to be able to just help them simplify and go step by step to navigate through their day, and right now that their mental health is something we all should be worried about. You know, loneliness is for sure, a pandemic for them, but the pressure that they're all under and creating the space for them to actually go live in the moment, live in the present, is such a gift. I think, of the tools that are being Speaker 3 50:37 built, especially at your company, there's a question here that is really a conundrum, so I would like us all to try to answer it, you guys. You guys are going to guess which one about trust? Okay, it is a concern of AI because it reduces connection between parent, teacher and student. We talked about that in our findings. How do you prevent when people turn to AI instead of a human to answer a question? And I would frame this as a big problem for everybody. I was talking to someone recently who said, Oh yeah, we just did employee morale. It was a large company employee morale survey had a lot of technical, sort of computer science engineering folks, and morale was way down, and they were like, well, what's going on? And it was that a lot of people were instead of asking a colleague for help, were asking AI. And so they were lonely at work. They just would come to work, and they were just there instead of saying, hey, you know, whoever? Susie, John, whatever you know. I mean, can you help me with this? They were just asking AI and so feeling just much more disconnected. So it is a problem like in the student teacher relationship. You know, there's great AI tools that let teachers who don't have time, for example, to read every kid's essay before they turn it in, and say, Hey, you can get feedback on your essay with this great AI tool. Kids interpret that as less care frequently, like, oh, they don't care about me. So how do we make sure we leverage AI but don't become disconnected? Speaker 6 52:18 I know a teacher who uses AI to get really structured personal feedback and then records it as a Unknown Speaker 52:26 voicemail, records it as a voicemail, Speaker 6 52:30 like they record, but it saves the teacher time, and it's Speaker 10 52:36 it's a good structure, right? So it's a teacher behind the scenes, teacher, yeah, it's a teacher Speaker 6 52:42 is very, very busy, just to, you know, assess by the essays. The AI assesses the essays, and she reads the summary and records personal voice notes for your Speaker 3 52:52 students, for each student, right? What? What do you guys like about this? This is, to me, a core, like, social problem, introducing this technology. I think one Speaker 7 53:01 of the things that we've been trying to do is introduce the technology in a community setting, so that they're learning with each other the types of the playbooks that we're creating, and then the space that we're creating in our events is for these young women to be learning together about how what their interaction is like, and then talking with each other about it. And you know, a good example of it is sort of the bias that happens in AI and sort of asking them creating the community spaces to say, why don't you go into four different tools and see, what if there's bias, and how do you feel about that? And do you trust the information that's coming at you? And I think by creating the space for them to be learning about it in a community, it creates a behavior pattern where you're actually talking about it like you're out with other people. And that's what some of the girls in our Advisory Board, who are these incredible women, you know, young women who are role models to other young girls. And then we have, it's one of the youngest, the youngest black woman to ever go to medical school. I think she's like 19. She wanted a voice to tell other girls like how to tell her story, and she's in this community talking about AI in science and how to be thoughtful about it. And then she has this panel of other women who are in science talking about how the pros become AI. And so we're creating communities that have discussions around it, because we're in the stage right now where you know anybody that says they're an expert, I don't think anybody's really an anybody's really an expert. Maybe you're maybe experts. But if you're not talking about it, you're not creating space to have those dialogs, then we're not going to ever be able to solve the problem that this question so thoughtfully poses. So that's where we're thinking about it. Speaker 5 54:35 I think I completely agree with that, because I think that there's a little bit of a parents and educators, adults putting on their oxygen mask, first learning a little bit more about how the tools work, how they should work, developing more social norms around when it again, back to this notion of intentionality, when it is helpful, when it is not, and actually approaching it with a critical lens. So you know, why do you think it gave this answer and actually unpacking a little bit of what goes behind the scenes? Because I think right now, it kind of goes back to this polarized all or nothing kind of approach, which is, AI works because it is predicting the next. It's a pattern matcher, right? And so I think breaking down some of the how it works, or what is behind the tech, to demystify some of that. It changes the conversation, not to plug the session that I'll be in right after this, but we are doing a vibe coding workshop, which is basically getting hands on with the tools in a judgment free space where I think we're all expected to have informed opinions, be experts, hypothesize about all of these things, but have we really spent enough time actually just trying the tools, and I don't mean that for young kids, and obviously putting developmentally appropriate scaffolding in place for their use, but as the adults to help inform what their relationship with this tech could, should, might look like. I think it's really imperative for us to sort of break down some of the mechanics of it. One of the things that we talk a lot about is, you know, AI literacy is obviously a big term. Speaker 3 56:15 There's a question about AI literacy, so please answer it. Well, great. This is Speaker 5 56:20 we're doing a lot in this space. Obviously, I personally believe that literacy is not a term that captures the whole opportunity. So I'll go to my six and a half year old daughter, who in first grade, she has been learning literacy, right? She's been learning the mechanics of the shapes of the letters, the sounds they make, what they sound like when they're put together. And, you know, she was kind of doing the work up front of like, Oh, why do you think a bee looks like them? That's a great question. I literally don't talk about that. But now she's at the phase where she has built on that foundational literacy. Now she has this book in her hand and just like bumping into walls because she can't look away from it. And I think that there's a real that, that attitude, that it doesn't AI literacy doesn't really capture that, right? It's aptitude, and it's attitude. And so we're, we're talking about this a lot as AI readiness. How do you become ready, as a family, as a classroom, to embrace what this can do, what it should do, and be really clear about how it works, so it changes your you know your response to that question. Speaker 3 57:30 We have three minutes left, three and a half minutes left, and I want to close where you left off. Miriam about your as a parent, we're all experts in our own right, working on this from different angles. You know, how are you thinking about this? As a parent? You talked about adults putting on the oxygen mask? Personally, I think that we are in a really different space with AI and kids because of the parent demand and advocacy that came before around cell phones, and that there is a great deal that we can benefit from. It's sort of this idea of screen free childhood, wait until eight. You know, no phones at the dinner table, right making space for real life modeling. I will say, however, that at the moment they're accessing Unknown Speaker 58:24 AI grades Speaker 3 58:26 and so that digital hygiene of you know, make sure no phones in the bedroom get in when it's on screen. Time is going to be good too, for a while, but soon AI is going to be in our Speaker 8 58:38 glasses, in our clothes, in our pencils and our notebooks. Speaker 3 58:41 I don't know where it's going to be embedded everywhere. So do not forget, do not think that sort of a screen Free Childhood is is going to as a slogan, is going to stand as a parent in the in the in the future, it's going to have to be something like a pro presence, as someone told me, you know the other day, pro presence childhood, or pro human or pro connection, childhood. So 30 seconds parents last. How you think of it as a parent? I think Speaker 6 59:10 parents need to learn about it, like you said, like put the oxygen mask on first and talk about, I actually talk more with my son, at least he is, like, really into. He's considering doing a PhD on AIC piece a week. And so, like, really super aggressive. My daughter's she's okay. I mean, she leaves up and she needs to, but I think we've got a good balance around I'm kind of fortunate that they were reasonably well grown up when I urged I think it's more difficult for like, much younger kids. It's going to be a more challenging kind of journey, but I think it is imperative that all parents start to learn about Unknown Speaker 59:57 this, so that they take position on it. Mira, did you want to add anything before I Speaker 5 1:00:01 say no, I think, just as a parent, I mean, my kids are younger, but I do think, like getting involved in their the conversations that are happening at their districts is really important. If they, if you're you are interested in joining, you know, a tech advisory board at your school, just to start asking the questions of how they're thinking about it, what research or evidence are they using to inform their decisions? And then I think just having really open conversations, being as transparent as possible about how this when developmentally appropriate, how this technology works when we use it, when we don't. Great. Unknown Speaker 1:00:36 All right. Maureen, last, final, closing thoughts, yeah. Speaker 7 1:00:39 I mean, I hear it, yeah. I think I agree with both of you, and I think the biggest thing is, and my kids say I'm a hybrid all the time because I work in the media's landscape, and I'm very strict. I'm the last to give them a phone, and I'm the last to let them on social media. But I actually it's really about being thoughtful and having intentional conversations in your household around when you're ready, talk about readiness, when you're ready to actually enter into the world of you know, first it's cell phones, then it's social media. Now it's AI. But you can't change and shape the world around us and build culture and build systems if you're not playing in them. And so my philosophy and our philosophy is create the space for them to be critical thinkers, be curious thinkers, to know themselves, to understand themselves, and to be more joyful human beings, and that's going to help them be more joyful and thoughtful and critical as their client Speaker 3 1:01:25 stays Fantastic. Well, join me in thanking our wonderful you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai