15 Oct AI For Everyone
Santa Barbara Public Library recently hosted a special event, AI for Everyone: Explore, Create & Discover What’s Possible with Artificial Intelligence, led by Jim Sterne, Mike Wald, and Mark Sylvester.
Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming a part of everyday life. This program introduced community members to this fast-growing technology, sharing key points on utilizing prompts within Chat GPT.
At the AI for Everyone Event, the speakers shared insights into what’s possible with today’s tools, from sparking creativity to boosting productivity, while also opening the conversation to what a thoughtful, responsible future with AI might look like. The introduction and evolution of artificial intelligence is a nuanced and complex conversation, with evolving best practices and metrics. While these conversations evolve, sharing the knowledge of AI tools with the community is important as we strive for technological equity. These tools should serve all communities and avoid perpetuating existing inequalities. The conversation of equity in the realm of artificial intelligence is an evolving one, and one that deserves maintained attention. A parallel conversation is that of bias, which is inherent to some of these tools.
From Ken Shelton and Dee Lanier at Edutopia, “Implementing carefully designed policies and regulations is crucial for ensuring the ethical deployment of artificial intelligence technologies in educational settings. Such policies and regulations must explicitly prohibit and actively counteract all forms of discrimination, including but not limited to racism, ageism, sexism, ableism, classism, and colonialism. These deeply entrenched systemic biases have long permeated societal institutions like education, perpetuating marginalization and oppression of vulnerable groups. As AI systems are not value-neutral but inherently reflect the biases and worldviews of their creators, a failure to institute robust safeguards risks further entrenching and amplifying existing disparities.”(Shelton, Lanier)
Santa Barbara Public Library is proud to provide opportunities for our community to engage with emerging technologies, expand skills, and spark new ideas. Curious about developing your technological tool kit? Check out the Santa Barbara Public Library’s Tech Coaching program here!
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