STAI CDT PhD students Chiara Di Bonaventura (2022 cohort) and Michelle Nwachukwu (2022 cohort) took part in the recent King’s Festival of Artificial Intelligence with their family-friendly workshop, ‘Fantastic (Artificial) Beasts and Where to Find Them’.
Chiara and Michelle’s workshop aimed to explore AI’s mysteries by engaging with children and their families through games, puzzles and more. One game in particular encouraged children to guess which images were human made or AI generated.
Organising workshops for children was a new experience for Chiara and Michelle, and as Chiara said, “It was challenging to organise because we had to put ourselves in the shoes of children and think about what they would have liked but it was definitely a rewarding experience”.
The workshop was a great opportunity to develop public engagement skills. Chiara said, “From the experience, I personally gained new perspectives on AI and it was great exposure to how to do public engagement. Children and their parents already knew a lot, which made things even more interesting and challenging because we were not expecting it”.
Chiara was really struck by children’s thoughts on AI and said, “It is interesting to note that one key factor children used to guess whether something (images, texts, music, voices) was produced by humans or AI was to look at the errors, if any. For them, ‘being human’ is related to the possibility of making mistakes”.
Chiara and Michelle were also supported by fellow STAI CDT student Wenxi Wu (2022 cohort) at the workshop.
You can read more about their workshop here. We also encourage you to keep up to date with the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence which highlights AI across King’s College London and organised King’s Festival of AI.