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Bongu students! Here's a fantastic free online course I recommend to understand AI fundamentals. Elements of AI is created by the University of Helsinki and offers a great introduction to AI concepts in a student-friendly way. Perfect for beginners!

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In spring 2018, MinnaLearn and the University of Helsinki came together with the aim of helping people to be empowered, not threatened, by artificial intelligence. Together, they built the Elements of AI to teach the basics of AI to people from a wide range of backgrounds.

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A free online introduction to artificial intelligence for non-experts

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Learn more about MinnaLearn's and the University of Helsinki's AI course - no programming or complicated math required.

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MIT's Scratch-based AI learning platform is perfect for younger students to start understanding AI concepts through hands-on projects. As your teacher, I've seen great results when students engage with this interactive platform!

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Scratch is a free programming language and online community where you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations.

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While sitting here in my classroom in Valletta, I often get asked about ChatGPT. It's a great tool for brainstorming ideas and getting explanations on difficult topics. Remember though - use it as a learning aid, not a replacement for your own thinking!

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As we use a lot of visual presentations in our Malta classroom, I recommend trying Canva's AI-powered design tools. They can help you create beautiful presentations and posters with minimal effort. Perfect for your school projects!

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Being responsible digital citizens is crucial! This BBC guide explains AI ethics in a way that's perfect for students. We discussed this in class last week, and it sparked some great conversations about responsible AI use.

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And it tells you this is a car.

It's pretty clear what's gone wrong.

From the limited number of images it was trained with, the AI has decided colour is the strongest way to separate cars and vans.

But the amazing thing about the AI program is that it came to this decision on its own - and we can help it refine its decision-making.

We can tell it that it has wrongly identified the two new objects - this will force it to find a new pattern in the images.

But more importantly, we can correct the bias in our training data by giving it more varied images.

These two simple actions taken together - and on a vast scale - are how most AI systems have been trained to make incredibly complex decisions.

How does AI learn on its own?

Supervised learning is an incredibly powerful training method, but many recent breakthroughs in AI have been made possible by unsupervised learning.

In the simplest terms, this is where the use of complex algorithms and huge datasets means the AI can learn without any human guidance.

ChatGPT might be the most well-known example.

The amount of text on the internet and in digitised books is so vast that over many months ChatGPT was able to learn how to combine words in a meaningful way by itself, with humans then helping to fine-tune its responses.

Imagine you had a big pile of books in a foreign language, maybe some of them with images.

Eventually you might work out that the same word appeared on a page whenever there was drawing or photo of a tree, and another word when there was a photo of a house.

And you would see that there was often a word near those words that might mean "a" or maybe "the" - and so on.

ChatGPT made this kind of close analysis of the relationship between words to build a huge statistical model which it can then use to make predictions and generate new sentences.

It relies on enormous amounts of computing power which allows the AI to memorise vast amounts of words - alone, in groups, in sentences and across pages - and then read and compare how they are used over and over and over again in a fraction of a second.

Should I be worried about AI?

The rapid advances made by deep learning models in the last year have driven a wave of enthusiasm and also led to more public engagement with concerns over the future of artificial intelligence.

There has been much discussion about the way biases in training data collected from the internet - such as racist, sexist and violent speech or narrow cultural perspectives - leads to artificial intelligence replicating human prejudices.

Another worry is that artificial intelligence could be tasked to solve problems without fully considering the ethics or wider implications of its actions, creating new problems in the process.

Within AI circles this has become known as the "paperclip maximiser problem", after a thought experiment by the philosopher Nick Bostrom.

He imagined an artificial intelligence asked to create as many paperclips as possible which slowly diverts every natural resource on the planet to fulfil its mission - including killing humans to use as raw materials for more paperclips.

Others say that, rather than focusing on murderous AIs of the future, we should be more concerned with the immediate problem of how people could use existing AI tools to increase distrust in politics and scepticism of all forms of media.

In particular, the world's eyes are on the 2024 presidential election in the US, to see how voters and political parties cope with a new level of sophisticated disinformation.

What happens if social media is flooded with fake videos of presidential candidates, created with AI and each tailored to anger a different group of voters?

In Europe, the EU is creating an Artificial Intelligence Act to protect its citizens' rights by regulating the deployment of AI - for instance, a ban on using facial recognition to track or identify people in real-time in public spaces.

These are among the first laws in the world to establish guidelines for the future use of these technologies - setting boundaries on what companies and governments will and will not be allowed to do - but, as the capabilities of artificial intelligence continue to grow, they are unlikely to be the last.

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What is AI? A simple guide to help you understand artificial intelligence - BBC News

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A guide to artificial intelligence, chatbots, image generators, deep learning and more. We explain how AI is trained, what different AI models can do and how you may already be using AI without knowing.

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Here's an important resource about staying safe while using AI tools. From our sunny Mediterranean classroom to your screens, remember to always be mindful of privacy and security when using AI applications. Never share personal information with AI tools!