Helping Kids Play With Artificial Intelligence | by Jason Boog | Towards Data Science

Every day, our kids are swept through the world by algorithms.
YouTube algorithms decide what videos they watch, GPS algorithms map what route they take to school, Spotify algorithms select what songs they hear, and personal assistants like Siri and Alexa advise them — all of it driven by artificial intelligence.
Kids (and adults!) leave these passive engagements with AI without any physical product — just an endless stream of passive consumption.
Instead of getting carried away by these digital currents, teachers, parents, and caregivers should show kids how to experiment with powerful tools like machine learning and neural networks.
We must raise kids who are capable of working alongside artificial intelligence in the workplace. The best workers of the future will be able to dictate, scribble, chat, and dream better with the help of technology.
Future workers will need to demonstrate creativity, flexibility, and comfort with machine learning and algorithmic tools. Through play, we can encourage these skills without sacrificing a sense of analog creativity.
We can show kids that AI is not a passive feature in their lives. AI is a tool, just as much as a pencil or paper. The real trick is knowing when and why a particular problem calls for a specific digital tool.
I spent the last six months learning enough code so I could use the superpowered GPT-2 language model to write stories.
I emerged with 50,000 words of strange and wonderful stories from my AI writing partner. I loved it all, but never found the perfect way to share it with new readers. The text was too strange to publish traditionally and too unwieldy to read as a straight-ahead PDF.
My daughter ultimately solved the problem for me, bringing home Lunch Money by Andrew Clements, a classic middle-grade novel about a kid who starts selling zines at his grade school.
You should read the whole novel, but this Google Books link will take you straight to the heart of the book: a recipe for making a simple 16-page zine with two pieces of paper...
books.google.com
Over the holidays, my daughter and I started making zines together. It was lovely, cutting, pasting, and scribbling inside these bitty books.
Each zine was a combination of images and text generated artificial intelligence, but they were edited, transcribed, and hand-written by human beings.
It’s a perfect combination of human and AI creativity — we call them “Machine Zines.”
That simple process was a revelation. As I took the time to hand-write my GPT-2 output, I became a participant in the writing process, rather than a passive guy pushing the “Go” button while GPT-2 did all the work.
I think zines are by far the best medium for sharing GPT-2 output. You can read the zine quickly and the reader won’t get bogged down in the sometimes awkward syntax of AI-generated text.
If you make your own zines, drop me a line. I’d love to share your work with more readers!
You don’t have to spend six months learning how to code to write with GPT-2 or other AI language models. Following these simple steps, you could write your own Machine Zines by the end of this article!
Working with the kid in your life, compose one or two sentences — the opening of a story, the first lines of a poem, or the start of a personal essay. That’s all you need. Here’s how we started:
A family creates small books with artificial intelligence. They are called "machine zines."
Once you have your first few sentences perfected, go to Talk To Transformer. Built by @AdamDanielKing, this website gives you instant access to GPT-2, a superpowered language model trained on eight million web pages. The company OpenAI trained GPT-2 and gradually made the powerful predictive text generator available to the public.
GPT-2 has a deceptively simple skill set: it can predict what should come next based on a given writing sample. Once you type in the sentences you wrote, Talk To Transformer works like the auto-complete on your smartphone.
Once you hit that button, GPT-2 will automatically complete your sentences. The output can range from a few sentences to a few paragraphs. Keep clicking “COMPLETE TEXT” until you get enough sentences to fill your zine.
Now that GPT-2 worked its magic, it’s time for you to write out the text by hand. This adds a human touch to the zine, and gives you a chance to edit the story however you like.
Cut sentences that don’t make sense, combine sentences, move paragraphs around, and add any words you like. You are the human! You are the boss of this zine!
Here’s what our final text looked like after we trimmed the text and moved things around to help express GPT-2’s message about human and AI creativity:
The first thing you need to do is stop. And think about what you want to see.Why not have the book do the talking? Why not have the machine sing? Why not have the machine write?A machine can talk to you.A machine can write you stories.They do not understand you.Sometimes a machine will do more. It will follow you from behind, writing stories for you.What will it write if you don't?What will it write if you try to stop it?Remember that it's just there to let you take the first step.What will it write?
Now it’s time to make something that only a human being can make.
Depending on how many pages you have, choose your favorite zine style. There are many different ways to fold zines, and they are all illustrated with amazing videos.
For instance, the 8-page zine format is really easy and really satisfying once you fold things correctly...
This 14-page model is a bit more complicated...
My daughter and I used the awesome Lunch Money by Andrew Clements method.
This Google Books link will take you straight to the heart of the book: a recipe for making a simple 16-page zine with two pieces of paper...
books.google.com
Once you make your zine, you can start adding text. But soon, you’ll realize something — you need some illustrations!
I am a terrible artist, and I could never create an image compelling enough to accompany these computer-generated stories.
BigGAN is a Generative Adversarial Network, a powerful synthesis of two separate neural networks working together to create something new. BigGAN works best for image generation, creating images of animals, objects, and people that never existed — they were generated by the AI model itself.
SyncedReview wrote more about BigGAN:
“All the attention surrounds the paper, Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis, which recently popped up on the social network. The paper is an internship project by Andrew Brock from Heriot-Watt University in collaboration with Jeff Donahue and Karen Simonyan from DeepMind...the model is capable of generating very impressive images with high fidelity and low variety gap.”
You can try it at home with this Google Colab notebook, a super-easy way to introduce kids to AI. Simply run the notebook and then use sliders and lists of objects to create something new.
My daughter and I spent a whole afternoon running the BigGAN code and generating computer versions of household objects to illustrate our Machine Zines.
Once my daughter had chosen the images for the zine, we printed them and pasted them inside our zine.
The final product is crooked, homemade, and perfectly human work of art, a way to share GPT-2 writing with fellow humans.
Of course, you don’t need to use AI to illustrate your Machine Zine!
Another day, I let my 4-year-old son illustrate a Machine Zine. I would read the GPT-2 produced text out-loud and he drew a picture.
I loved how the mix of his drawings and AI words turned out. My kid had helped take this story out of a cold digital context and reframe it as something warm, friendly, and human.
This was so much more than pushing “GO” button. We collaborated, my family and the AI.
There is no way of hiding from this huge change in human and AI relations.
The change has already begun, and we need to prepare our children to flourish in a world disrupted by machine learning, neural networks, and other 21st-century digital tools.
Instead of being afraid of these changes, we can augment our children’s imaginations, expanding everything they can dream.