Artificial intelligence is behind voice assistants, film suggestions, photo filters and chatbots. It can seem like magic, but it is a program that has learned patterns from huge numbers of examples. At the AI Academy, Year 6 coders find out how it learns — and why it should never be trusted blindly.
What your child will learn
- Know that AI systems learn patterns from data rather than being told every rule
- Explain why the quality of training data matters
- Understand that AI makes mistakes and can be biased
- Use AI responsibly: check facts, protect private information and be honest about using it
Learning from examples
To teach a computer to recognise cats, nobody writes a rule for “cat”. Instead the AI is shown thousands of labelled photos and finds patterns for itself. This is called machine learning, and the photos are its training data.
Only as good as its data
If the examples are unbalanced or wrong, the AI will be too — that is bias. A chatbot can also state something false in a confident voice, so facts still need checking. AI has no feelings or understanding; people are responsible for how it is used.
Example questions
Here are a few questions like the ones in the first quest. Can you solve them?
1. Who creates AI systems?
- Other planets
- People
- Animals
- Nobody — they appear by themselves
Show answer
Answer: People. People design them, choose the data and decide how they are used.
2. A film app suggests films you might like. How does it choose?
- It looks for patterns in what you watched before
- It reads your mind
- It guesses at random
- A person phones the company
Show answer
Answer: It looks for patterns in what you watched before. Recommendations come from patterns in data.
3. Which of these does an AI NOT have?
- Electricity
- A program
- Real feelings
- Data
Show answer
Answer: Real feelings. An AI can sound friendly, but it does not feel anything.
Tips for grown-ups
- Play “train the robot”: sort objects into two piles without saying the rule, then ask someone to guess it.
- Ask a chatbot a question you know the answer to and check whether it is right.
- Talk about when it is fair to use AI for schoolwork, and when it isn’t.