How MoSAIC Uses Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Reading age: 17-18 years
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Intended audience: General reader
Author: Gareth Campbell
Firstly, a huge thank you to everybody who used and shared our Black History Month lesson resources. The response from students, educators and featured role models has been overwhelmingly positive. Equality, diversity and inclusion is something that MoSAIC is passionate about promoting all year round and being central to everything that we do, particularly when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been plagued with controversy in recent years. From complaints regarding copyright violations to worrisome levels of ongoing racial bias. MoSAIC recognises that AI is a useful tool for making our busy modern lives easier and more efficient. We are using AI all the time with out really knowing, smart speakers and assistants on our phones are a great example. Educators are also habitually making use of AI in the classroom, most notably with Google Translate, helping us to break down language barriers. However, there is a need to educate our young people about the growing concerns as AI usage increases. Bizarrely, AI and machine learning appear nowhere in secondary curricula in the UK (that we are currently aware of).
From a business perspective, we use AI programs such as CopyAI and Smodin to help write copy and proofread for our website and social media posts. We also use OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 text-to-image AI program extensively to create imagery for our website, social media and our forthcoming virtual museum, due to launch in Spring 2023. It has been incredible how AI can help a small startup company to maximise efficiency, and we want to give young people the tools needed to utilise this wonderful technology safely.
We are encouraging young people to augment their learning and creativity through workshops and art exhibitions. Our current workshop offering focuses on how AI can help students to unlock their own creativity while also educating students about how machine learning works and how it can amplify human biases depending on the data sets that are inputted.
In order to answer questions about AI and education, let's start with a fundamental question: What does it mean for students to be creative? The most common answer is that creativity involves coming up with new ideas or producing something that hasn't been done before. In this sense, creativity is based on the ability to think outside of conventional boundaries and generate novel solutions—a skill that has become increasingly important as our world becomes more complex and dynamic. Many critics of AI suggest that it is diluting or even erasing creativity. But this is potentially missing the point. AI isn’t intended to replace human creativity; rather supplement it. At MoSAIC, we believe that with artificial intelligence (AI), we can give students prompts to help them think about ideas they may not otherwise have thought about, which often leads them down a path of making artworks, poems and stories that are truly their own, but would not have existed without AI. By helping them understand these intricacies related both internally (within themselves) and externally (in terms of their environment), AI works as an invaluable tool when teaching children how they can be innovative thinkers when faced with problems outside their comfort zone. In my role as a teacher, I've seen firsthand how AI can help students develop their learning in a way that is new and exciting. Furthermore, employers are desperate for a generation of abstract thinkers who can combine the creativity of the arts with the rational thinking of the sciences, and our workshops aim to foster this.
Learn more about our current workshops here. Our workshops are currently in their trial phase and are offered to schools in the UK for a heavily discounted price to help us tailor the experience to different school contexts before our full launch in Spring 2023. If you would like to take part in these trials, please register your interest by contacting us here.
We are excited to be part of a potential paradigm shift in education. MoSAIC is offering a glimpse into the future of learning, and it’s here now.
About the author:
Gareth is MoSAIC’s founder and works part time as a secondary school teacher in Bristol
Gareth is currently reading: ‘The Polymath’ by Waqas Ahmed
Disclosure: MoSAIC has not been paid by any mentioned company in this blog post however we have received grants in the form of credits from OpenAI and Smodin to help with our work in education. A huge thank you to both companies.