Essential skills your children must acquire to be equipped for a world driven by AI

By Muddassar Nazar

Using the help of AI models like ChatGPT, Jasper, Midjourney, and many more, you may imagine or build anything you want on the spur of the moment in our new AI-generative world. Do you wish to publish a story that serves as an example? You can publish your novel by sending in your prompts to ChatGPT and Midjourney!

But two essential abilities will determine our kids’ success in this new normal. I’ll concentrate on the first in this article: the capacity to produce useful inputs. Knowing how to use this expertise is a crucial first step for parents who are unsure about how their child will succeed in this AI-driven future.

Developing useful inputs is the foundation of AI interactions.

Even with its amazing capabilities, generative AI operates on a basic principle: it can only produce useful outputs when it receives useful inputs.

Clearly stating goals

Clarity is crucial prior to any interaction with an AI system. Students must comply with:

• Emphasise their objectives: What do they want to get out of a certain engagement, or even the AI system? Is it entertainment, knowledge, or fixing problems? Their use of the AI tool will be based on this understanding. It’s similar to knowing where you want to go before embarking on a journey and choosing your destination.
• Establish specifications: Building on their objectives, kids must know how to control the parameters that govern their interactions with AI tools. Similar to the laws of a game like chess, parameters are precise instructions or rules that specify how the AI should react. Give your child a chessboard and don’t explain to them how the pieces move, and they will probably become frustrated and move the pieces randomly. The same is true when utilising AI models like ChatGPT; in the absence of explicit parameters, the results may be erroneous and stochastic. Regardless of how the world changes, teaching kids this ability will make them more productive users of technology and promote disciplined thinking, which is a need that will always be important.
• Emphasize the context: In the realm of AI, comprehending the wider context of a query is essential to getting precise and pertinent results. It’s like telling a child a story; if they don’t grasp the context or history, the story can become meaningless. This is precisely what ChatGPT’s custom instruction feature does. Until you disable it, the context will be included in all prompts once a custom instruction has been inserted.

Recognising the medium

With text, images, and audio serving as the main medium for the time being, inputs can take many other forms, each with its own set of complexities.

• Textual comprehension: Educating young students to write a basic school essay is comparable to teaching them how to communicate with AI. Both roles call for accuracy and clarity. Consider helping your twelve-year-old with a Vietnamese customs school assignment. Instead of merely saying something general like, “Vietnam has rich traditions,” start with something specific. Assist them in creating a comprehensive introduction, such as, “Tết, or the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, is a colourful event that heralds the arrival of spring.” While communicating with AI systems, the same level of clarity is required. You should encourage your youngster to ask more focused questions, such “What are the main customs and traditions celebrated during Tết in Vietnam?” rather than letting an AI tool answer a general one like “Tell me about Vietnam.”

• Visual components: One of the most important ways to help students learn how to make high-quality inputs for computers and AI is to teach them about pictures and images. Tools like Midjourney’s “/blend” option, which combines up to five photos into a single merged composition, are something parents may demonstrate to their children. They may already be aware of the usefulness of social media picture editors, but they are not without restrictions. In Photoshop, for instance, AI-driven features like Generative Fill can produce a realistic-looking face to enhance an existing image, but the output is likely to be generic; for example, it is highly unlikely that your child’s distinct face can be recreated from a back view photo without a frame of reference. The usage of visual input will become essential to generative AI as technology develops and visual pictures can be translated into prompts more successfully. This integration highlights even more how crucial it is for kids to learn how to choose and use images as inputs carefully in order to get the results they want.
• Audio inputs:Teaching kids to speak clearly is now easier with AI. Parents can use voice tools to help children practise their speech. These tools can understand different accents and even correct pronunciations. AI can also copy a child’s unique voice with today’s advancements. Acoustic inputs: AI has made it simpler to teach children how to talk correctly. Parents can help their children rehearse speaking by using voice tools. These technologies can even accurately pronounce words and distinguish between various accents. AI has advanced to the point that it can now mimic a child’s distinct voice.

Conclusion

It takes critical thinking, clarity, and appropriate use of ever-evolving technologies to prepare our kids for life in an AI-generated world. After discussing the need of producing quality inputs, we will examine another crucial ability in a later topic. Watch how our children’s future in an AI-driven world is shaped by this second key skill. Please feel free to contribute your ideas and perspectives on this subject in the interim. What other essential ability do you anticipate being needed?

(The author is Muddassar Nazar, CEO, Birla Brainiacs, and the views expressed in this article are his own)