Building AI Understanding
Are you starting from scratch with generative AI? Do you struggle with how to talk to your kids about AI? Our district AI plan starts out by building an understanding of what generative AI is and what our viewpoints are on its potential impact on student learning and the society that our Spartans will be entering once they leave our walls.
Below is an excerpt from our Generative AI FAQ document. You can read the entire FAQ document by clicking this link (Generative AI FAQ Document). It breaks these tough concepts down into bitesized questions and answers. Or if you are feeling adventurous, check out sections one and two of our full district AI plan by clicking this link (District AI Plan).
Finally, be on the lookout for a series of posts outlining some basic artificial intelligence terms that you will be hearing more about from your children in the fall! These include “AI vs. Generative AI”, “Hallucinations”, “Training Data”, “Prompts”, and “Deepfakes”.
1.1 What is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how does it work?
A specific, powerful type of AI you may have heard about is Generative AI. This is a system that, when given an instruction (a "prompt"), can produce new content like text, images, or music that simulates what a human might create.
It's helpful to think of AI as a very powerful pattern-finder. It has been "trained" on enormous amounts of information from the internet. By analyzing all this data, the AI learns to recognize patterns such as the features that typically appear in a picture of a cat or the common sentence structures used in a formal email. When you give it a prompt, the AI uses these learned patterns to predict what should come next. It is not "thinking," "knowing," or "understanding" like a human; it is making highly sophisticated calculations based on the patterns it has seen before.
1.2 Why are we embracing AI instead of banning it?
Olympia’s vision is to use AI as a tool to augment, not replace, the essential role of our dedicated teachers. Additionally, we are committed to teaching our students and staff how to understand, evaluate, and use these tools in a way that aligns with our district's core values. This approach empowers our community to make informed decisions and prepares students for the world they will inherit and shape. We believe a simple ban on AI is ineffective because these tools are already widely and freely available to the public and are constantly evolving. Instead of a ban, our plan focuses on building a culture of responsible innovation.
1.3 Does Olympia believe AI-generated information can be trusted?
Information from an AI should never be trusted blindly. Because AI is a pattern-finder and not a fact-checker, it can and does make mistakes; sometimes called "hallucinations”.
Furthermore, because AI models are trained on data from the internet, they can reproduce the full spectrum of human biases and stereotypes found in that data. This means that biased or inaccurate information is not a random glitch but a predictable outcome of how AI is designed.
For these reasons, we have a fundamental expectation for all students and staff: critically evaluate, question, and verify any information from an AI. Facts, claims, and data must be checked using trusted sources, such as academic databases, reputable websites, textbooks, and, most importantly, the expertise of our teachers.