Rebecca Winthrop
speaker
127 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 17 Jan
Rebecca Winthrop’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It also, there's a huge equity gap in terms of language. Large language models work off of language that is written down. There's a lot of languages that aren't written down that much. They have very little written down. And so there you're seeing a global gap across the globe between sort of African and indigenous languages and communities versus English speaking or other large languages.
So equity is a huge one. Your question about sort of public versus private, I would say to public education systems, do not have FOMO. Because that is what the gut instinct is when a new technology comes. I'm missing out. I have a fear of missing out. And I need to adopt it. And I see this. So don't have FOMO. Don't use it unless it's a real problem you want to solve.
Do give it to the adults in the school building. Give it to teachers. Have them use it and figure out how it will help them today. Then give it to sort of really, you know, novel school leaders to think about how they could maybe restructure the teaching and learning experiences. What are the things that AI can do? There's so much that AI could actually do to help make public schools work better.
Bus schedules, calendaring, school meals, cafeteria. I mean, assessment input. There's so much time that could be really freed up.
I think it is 50% right. And I think the 50% depends on the age of the child. I absolutely 100% think you should send your kids to the Waldorf School with the wood blocks when they're young. You know, we know that early childhood, the more screen time they have, the less language acquisition they have. We know that when infants are learning language, they learn a lot of language from...
human-to-human contact. And if you put the same sentences on a screen, they don't learn it. Our neurobiology is not going to change in, you know, five years. So we have to work with—that's the only confines I think we really have to work with, and everything else I think we can reimagine. But it's true that when kids get older— You do want to teach AI literacy.
When kids understand this is true for social media too, when kids sort of learn about, oh, these big companies are trying to addict me. They're doing it for free, but I get with my attention and staying on it longer is how they make money. You tell that to teenagers. Actually, there's been great research on this and they get pissed off. I think we need to do the same with AI literacy.
Like this is how it works. It's not some magical thing. It's not another human being. So when kids get older, we need to teach them about that. And then they need, when they get older, they need to start playing with it, playing with it, using it. But my huge caveat is with AI that is designed for kids. Right now, there is a spring fling race by the large AI labs to get students to sign up.
You've got ChatGPT giving two months free of GPT Plus. Then you got XAI come in, two months free for SuperGrok. And then Google, not to be outdone, is like, well, you can get a year free and I'll give you two terabytes of storage. And these are largely for college students. And Google just made Gemini available for kids through Parents with Family Plan. And they are racing.
to get allegiance of young kids. This is terrible because those products are not designed for children and for learning.
So I think that AI has real potential for very specific use cases, particularly around access gaps. And in Nigeria, what was done was after school, twice a week, an AI tutor helped kids learn English. And it was for six weeks, which is not long. It was June, July, I think. And it was a randomized controlled trial.
We're still waiting for all the evidence to come through, but 0.3 standard deviations, which is pretty good, equivalent to maybe two years of average sort of English learning. And we see that difference with other technologies, too. It doesn't have to be Gen AI. It can be rule-based AI. It could be predictive AI.
We've seen sort of similar benefits, for example, in Malawi, teaching literacy and numeracy to kids with offline tablets where teachers have maybe 80 to 100 kids in a class. And each kid is having sort of a personalized adaptive learning experience. That is hugely beneficial as well. So that's one use case. Another use case that I think is really great is neurodivergent kids. Super helpful.
There's all sorts of kids that have different learning differences that struggle in school, don't have access to the specialists that they need, that would benefit greatly from being in a classroom where they could have a little assistant to help them navigate. My youngest son has dyslexia and they sort of read and write, text-to-speech, speech-to-text has been game-changing for him.
There's also use cases here in the U.S. You see AI being used and experimented around supporting wellness advisors who kind of fill the gap for school counselors in rural school districts, for example, where they don't have school counselors. which is actually an actual person, but AI is boosting that person's ability to have a helpful conversation with a kid.
And it's bringing through tech a mental health resource into a community that didn't have one. So there's lots of use cases, actually, if done well, contained well, designed well, and we humans have our hand on the steering wheel.
Exactly.
Absolutely. And the key is what you said, contain the system. We can't sort of just bring commercial tech into our schools and hope it will solve these problems. It has to have guardrails. We have to make sure that the data that it's being trained on is legit and not going to create harmful prompts for kids.
We've seen terrible things with commercial AI companions, with young people developing relationships and being really manipulated emotionally. But you can put guardrails. It's totally possible. It's just where, who, what the, frankly, it gets back to the incentives. It gets back to the business model, which is where you, you know, regulation and government could and should step in.
So yes, if contained is the question.
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