In our ongoing series about the impact of AI at Jesuit High School, Jesuit Media writers are focusing on the many ways it affects a Jesuit education.
This picture shown during Mr. Toe’s presentation on AI in society shows what AI generates given the prompt “people in a social services office” to encourage the audience to see the potential downsides of AI generation and how it could reinforce stereotypes.
One student found this workshop interesting because he discussed a lot of the problems with AI image generation and how it often shows the stereotypes of the prompt that is entered.
Some examples of these images are as when the prompt “stay at home mom” was entered it would always show a white woman cleaning in a house, and others like “Doctor” showed an old white man in a lab coat. Both of these are the preconceived view of what these prompts are, there is no real definition to them
“I found the AI images to be really shocking in how they are also most life-like, but scary how they are using stereotypes to create these images,” junior Quintin Stanley said.
Mr. Toe explained how incorporating AI into life and the workplace could cause job displacement. However, he also discussed how people could also use AI to make the workplace more efficient and have it work with people, providing a better human approach to issues in the workplace.
Students that attended the workshop really liked how Mr. Toe went about making it sound less complex, and simplifying it for the common student. He used others tactics by showing us images and a ted talk about artificial intelligence, and its real world implications.
“I really liked how he didn’t talk a lot and he just laid out simple facts and showed us a video and kept us interested,” junior Carson Galbraith said.
Mr. Toe studied Sociology in college and he works with technology and AI in his job from working in and around technology at Jesuit in the IT office.
Mr. Toe chose to focus on society and how he could understand what students think about AI and its potential uses and problems. He wanted to hear what students were using it for and how we think it should be ethically used in the future.
“I’m passionate about the subject because I understand if used properly technology can help our society grow out of some (not all) of the issues we currently face,” Toe said.
