[ Cheers and applause ]
-Thank you so much. I'm Chris Voorhees.
I am a member of the Board of Trustees here at MOHAI.
I'm also a co-chair for the Innovation Exchange.
I'm here with Mark Kotzer and Ana Pinto da Silva,
who are my fellow co-chairs.
And before we really get going today,
we've got several thank yous to get through,
and we'll start with the sponsors for this event,
Black Sky, The Hugh and Jane Ferguson.
And then a special thank you to Maureen Frisch,
who's a fellow trustee, and just a mega friend of the museum.
And really, this is, as you guys know,
this is a free event for all of us that are here.
That would not be possible without the support
from these folks.
In addition, we've got in-kind sponsors of CORT Party Rental,
Foodz Catering,
and the Seattle Channel that's going to try to take this event
and spread it out to the rest of our community.
So thank you to them.
[ Applause ]
And then we'd like to give a special thank you
to the rest of the Innovation Exchange Committee.
This is members of the MOHAI staff,
fellow trustees and other volunteers from the community
without which we wouldn't have a good plan, a good event,
and it wouldn't be nearly as rich
as it's going to be for all of you this evening.
So let's give this folks round of applause as well.
A final to all of you,
and you're going to be thanked a few times for both attending
and also participating in this event tonight.
I'm very, very happy to see so many people here
on a Thursday evening when it's sunny out,
and you could be someplace else,
to have this important conversation and to participate,
as you will a few times over the course of the evening.
I'm curious. How many of you is it for which
that this is your first time at MOHAI
or your first time at a MOHAI event?
Let's raise your hands.
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
Welcome to MOHAI.
At least a few of you might be curious as to
why a history museum is having an innovation event.
But for folks that are friends of MOHAI and fans,
and hopefully all of you will be by the end of the evening,
that won't be a surprise at all because you know
that MOHAI isn't just a place that you come to view history.
It's a place
where history happens because history is dynamic.
It's changing.
It's shaped by our society, our culture.
It's shaped by changes in technology and our environment,
and there isn't any better example of that than the city
in which we live, Seattle, that's been dynamic
and hugely changed by those factors and others,
and has reaped the benefits of those changes.
And has also had to reckon with the costs
and had to reckon with the challenges associated with that.
That's MOHAI's job.
MOHAI's charter is to tell those stories.
And because that story is always changing,
you can't just do that with exhibits.
You have to do that with conversations.
You have to do that with discussions and debates.
And the Innovation Exchange is one of those conversations.
It's one where we bring present leaders
and future ones together to talk about a topic that's of urgency.
That topic could be COVID, or climate,
or even space in the solar system around us.
We get those folks together and talk about
how today's developments will change our community,
our world, and our future history.
And for us on the committee,
there was no better and more urgent topic
to discuss this year at this Innovation Exchange than AI,
which is our topic for this evening.
-So our decision to focus to this year's
Innovation Exchange on AI was remarkably easy.
AI is rapidly transforming how we work,
how we learn, and how we live.
And many of the companies are leading the way.
Our companies are based right here.
Our company is based right here in Seattle and the Puget Sound.
That's all very exciting,
but it also raises lots
of interesting questions and challenges.
This is all --
this all had the makings of a perfect topic to explore.
So we decided that AI is moving so fast
that it needed a very different kind of Innovation Exchange.
Rather than hearing just from technologists and
business leaders,
we wanted to spotlight voices and perspectives
that are often left out,
or not effectively heard in the discussions about AI.
We wanted to create an event that provides an opportunity for
the broader community to share their hopes and fears about AI.
And perhaps most importantly, we also wanted to design an event
where the community would inspire conversations about
how we can work together to shape the future of AI.
So our goal this evening is for you all to be inspired,
to be challenged,
and perhaps to be moved to take action in some way.
-Huge gratitude to all of you and especially
to MOHAI to taking a leap on this strange format
of an event of PechaKucha.
So, as we come into this amazing moment,
I just want to take a quick poll of the audience.
How many of you know how to say PechaKucha?
All right, so let's do it all together, PechaKucha,
PechaKucha, PechaKucha.
All right, what does this mean?
It is an onomatopoeia.
It is from Japan, and it means chit-chat, right, chit-chat.
Chit-chat is the heartbeat of community,
this little tiny modest little thing like a maraca, right?
That's how we come together.
That's how we share ideas.
That's how we challenge each other.
We test each other. We encourage each other.
We blow kisses to each other through our little chit-chat.
And that is why these events are so important,
not just because of the brilliant presenters
on the stage, but because of you and how we come together.
And we blow secrets to each other of our intention
and our dreams and what we want for each other and ourselves.
So we're going to do a little teeny tiny interaction.
Let's do it.
If you helped to found PechaKucha Seattle,
and you're in this audience, and I know some of you are here.
Carrie, Christy, I know you're here.
People who have been part of PechaKucha's story in the past,
can you can -- you please stand up?
All right.
If you have presented at a PechaKucha in the past,
can you please stand up? Orlando, I see you.
If this is your first ever PK event, can you please stand up?
Everybody who stands up, stay standing.
You're going to sit for a long time.
Get on your feet.
All right, you got this, your first event.
If you're here because you believe in the power
of community and the power of our community to affect change,
can you stand up?
All right, and if you're just damn glad
that this event is not on Zoom, stand up.
So at its core, PechaKucha is about community.
PK was founded in 2003 by two troublemakers in Japan,
Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, who are architects.
They're actually very famous, very talented architects,
and they had an incredible community in Tokyo
of all different sorts of troublemakers.
They launched an art gallery in association with their practice,
and they wanted to celebrate these great people.
But, you know, a lot of their friends were architects,
and they're a little long-winded as those of you
who know architects know.
And so they said, hey, you know what?
We want to have you present your work at our new gallery space,
but you guys are long-winded,
so each of you have 20 slides each and 20 seconds per slide.
And, oh, by the way,
those slides automatically forward,
and you have no control, so 6 minutes,
40 seconds is all you got.
That is how PechaKucha was brought into this world.
These evenings became so successful
that Mark and Astrid's
friends who were coming to visit from all over the world
started to experience them.
And they said, hey, we should have these events in our cities.
So from PechaKucha Tokyo came PechaKucha London,
came PechaKucha Paris, right?
Seattle, San Francisco, was PechaKucha number 8.
Seattle was PechaKucha number 32.
And we have since become one
of the most prolific PechaKucha cities in the world.
We have been around for 18 years.
This is our 78th event.
We have hosted over 900 speakers from across our brilliant
and beautiful community on this PechaKucha stage.
We've reached thousands and thousands of audience members,
and I'm hugely grateful to all of our partners,
and especially to the Seattle Channel for extending the magic
that is inherent to our community,
to the magic within our community.
And PechaKucha is fueled by one thing.
It's fueled by the whole lot of love in this community
and by people who know that we come together to build
and create a more joyous, more equitable MHCI+D,
I see you, more joyous,
more equitable, and more resilient world,
and we do that together.
So these are just some images of some
of the most amazing events that we've had.
We create spaces and places
for our creative community to come together to discuss,
to share, to celebrate, and to learn and lead together.
And we always have one singular goal,
and that singular goal is to create courageous community,
one heartbeat, one event, one chit-chat at a time.
So partnership and friendship
have always been at the heart and the core of what we do.
It's not only about collaboration.
It's really about how we come together and make the future
possible, and I think that's what makes this event here
at MOHAI so special.
So today's event exemplifies this from MOHAI
to the Seattle Channel, from Tillicum Middle School
to the William Grose Center for Innovation,
from the University of Washington,
to Seattle University, oh no, I see you.
From the wonderful intros by my amazing MHCI+D students
to the brilliant performance by the BWB Drumline.
Let's give it up to them one more time.
[ Cheers and applause ]
PK is powered by partnership and fueled forward by community.
No one exemplifies these qualities better than my friend
and my collaborateur, the amazing,
the inspiring Leonard Garfield.
Brilliant leadership, insight, generosity,
creativity, care,
and commitment are the hallmarks that come to mind.
It is a privilege to be here and to work in community with you
and to serve on your board.
Leonard, for those of you who do not know,
is the director of the Museum of History & Industry,
where he works with a team of community members,
trustees, and staff to empower every Seattle resident,
and particularly its youngest citizens with the tools
of history, as we work together to build a stronger future.
And guess what?
He's about to celebrate his 25th year leading our community.
And with that, I give you, Leonard Garfield.
-Wow.
Well, thank you, Ana Pinto de Silva is amazing,
so let's have a round of applause for Ana.
You are unbelievable. Ana has created such community
around the PechaKucha concept and community,
and it's really amazing. Hey, here's an interactive part.
Look around you, right around here,
because we're going to be talking a lot about the future.
But as Chris said earlier, we are surrounded by history,
a history that stretches back to time immemorial
and is constantly reaching toward the future.
The land in the waters
upon which we gather right now are the historic
and contemporary lands of the Coast Salish people,
whose displacement we acknowledge,
and whose insurance we honor.
On this site were Duwamish seasonal camps.
Imagine the life that was there, the richness of that.
And this was the very spot
where David Denny built his pioneer timber mill,
which transformed the Seattle economy.
Look up there.
We sit under the wings
of the very first commercial airplane ever built by Boeing,
engineered by a young Chinese aviation prodigy named Wong Tsu.
And that rowing shell that you see there,
that's the historic Husky Challenger,
a reminder from the Boys in the Boat who proved that,
by pulling together,
we can accomplish more than those who would tear us apart.
And even the floor beneath you is historic,
where the greatest generation trained
in the darkest days of World War II,
to win a war of democracy over tyranny,
a struggle that echoes down through time
to this very moment.
And here too around these walls and in these galleries
is the story of made-in-Seattle innovation,
from groundbreaking advances in medicine,
to exploring the farthest reaches of space,
innovations where Seattleites, our neighbors,
you have turned the once improbable
into the now indispensable.
Each of these moments in history has been transformational,
much like AI is certain to transform our world
and our lives again. And, each year,
more than 20,000 young people come to MOHAI
to explore those stories
and imagine their role in our future history.
What they learn is that for generations,
as today,
Seattle's history has been filled with the promise
of new opportunities,
but always tempered by the challenges of difficult change.
So as we grapple today with the promises
and the challenges of AI,
we know from our study of Seattle history
that a community built on collaboration,
where individuals are willing to work across barriers,
to risk together and to find common purpose,
that that community, our community,
will find new solutions, building on our history,
for sure, but never been bound by it,
as we move toward a future that is strong
and equitable and sustainable.
Now, I get to do something very special for me as a historian
because I get to introduce you to somebody
who has made history, time and again,
and continues to shape our community and our world.
Dr. Constance Rice is a member
of the University of Washington Board of Regents.
She is the president of the Very Strategic Group,
which is a very good name, Constance.
And she's deeply involved in educational
and civic projects that range from Seattle
to the Mississippi Delta to Swaziland.
Dr. Rice has served as a leader of Seattle Community Colleges
and the Casey Foundation,
where she was a tireless advocate
for the health and safety of children,
especially those in foster care.
As founder of the Strategic Education Centers,
Dr. Rice helped establish
two educational centers in Swaziland.
She served as the national founding executive director
of the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, USA,
and all the while serving our community as a citizen leader,
tackling nutrition, education,
and helping lead such institutions
as the Seattle Art Museum, the Evans School at UW,
the Links, Incorporated, Downtown Rotary,
and so much more.
So, Dr. Rice, I hope that if in my awe and admiration of you,
I call you historic,
you will understand
that I mean it in the very best possible way.
Everyone, please join me in welcoming a local hero
with global impact, Dr. Constance Rice.
-It's really great,
and I want to really re-acknowledge Leonard
and the entire board for what they continue to do.
I can't believe that Leonard has shepherded us in this place
with its history in three different locations
over a 25-year period,
and we have great gratefulness to you, Leonard.
Ana, I don't know.
I can say the little bit of Japanese is arigatou gozaimasu.
What a blessing it is for you to bring us together for chit-chat.
And Ana sent me about five emails making sure
that I talked for maybe three seconds,
so I've got to try to do that.
And but I will ask you for some actual community response
in a call-and-response situation.
So in part -- and part as my welcome,
you know our topic is artificial intelligence,
and it's a very important topic for us,
and it's a very important action for us.
So one of the things that when I did my research for today,
I recognized something very interesting.
We're the epicenter of AI.
Microsoft, Google,
Amazon are all the companies that are dealing with AI.
Matter of fact, the world is looking to us in terms of AI.
The world is looking to compete with us regarding AI.
Well, on the surface,
AI sounds very provocative, very interesting, and it is,
but we have some preliminary indicators of
why we're worried a bit about AI.
We worry about AI
because of the misinformation
that it can increase to develop to us.
We worry about AI
because some of the algorithms definitely include biases
that begin to continue and get embedded.
We celebrate AI because it can help us
when it comes to medicine
when it comes to geology and the environment.
So we have a double-edged sword.
Now what is AI? AI is a human product.
What can AI do for us?
It can lift us only if we, as humans,
gather together in the community way
in order to make sure that there are guardrails.
I was looking at one of the messages coming to me
from the United States Office of Technology,
and that office indicated that they would like to do,
out of The White House, a Bill of Rights, a blueprint on AI,
in order to make sure there are guardrails
that do not include the segregation of thought
and of energy and creativity in a negative way.
Now, we'll hear a little bit more about that later,
but I wanted to seed that with you
that there are good things that are happening,
and there are challenging things that are happening.
And Ana, in her brilliance,
has brought together a multi-sector group
of individuals, multi-generational sector,
of individuals, and even a drumline.
Now, 300 of you are here. The day is shiny.
The price was right.
It's a free day, but I need a commitment.
I need you to look to your neighbor to your right
and say to your neighbor
I'm interested in a community-led guardrail
for artificial intelligence.
I believe, all right.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
And this is -- this is really good.
I'm getting the chit-chat going.
And look to your person to your left
and say I'm capable of presenting a community-led
version of making sure we see equity,
and we see growth, and we see innovation community-led.
Thank you very much and enjoy your day.
-Our first presenter is Brian Pan
and the students of the Tillicum Middle School
from the Bellevue School District.
Brian is a career and technical education teacher,
and he has several amazing students
you're going to see on film in just a second,
as they showcase their hopes and dreams for the future of AI.
[ Applause ]
-Thank you, Leonard.
At Bellevue School District, one of the things
that we kind of focus on is talk less and smile more.
And I think that really hits home
for what we're trying to do here.
So I'm going to throw it right to Rand,
who's going to introduce the video
that you're going to watch.
-Tonight, you will hear a couple of my peers
at Tillicum Middle School
commenting about their thoughts and experiences with AI.
These students are all registered
in at least one CTE course from either video production,
computer technology, or STEM.
We hope that the insight of students my age will help
drive the development of AI forward, thank you.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
-I know that AI stands for artificial intelligence,
and it's a recently invented type of programming
that can get computers to learn
or understand what humans are telling them and improvise,
making new decisions each time they are asked.
-I know that AI is a very intelligent computer tool
that can help people facilitate their jobs
and can also help perform very complex tasks that us,
as humans, we can't even do.
-One of the things that I know about AI
is that it's moving really quickly, and that,
within in the last few years,
it's like -- it was like we're not at the same level
as we were like five years ago.
-What a normal AI is it's an emerging field
and that it's a fairly new place to study.
It's not fully developed yet
and that it could be like really important in the future.
-I know a little bit about AI. I'm not too educated,
but I know the basic concept of it like how it learns
and stuff like that.
I generally just like to screw around and have fun with it.
I haven't done anything actually very professional with it.
I'd say that it's pretty easy to use even for someone like me
who doesn't know a whole ton about it.
-What I know about AI is that it is a virtual thing
that copies, hears,
and tries to replicate what a human would say based
on what it sees off its copy of the internet.
♪♪
-So far, I've used it only for images.
I've heard there are new AI video apps,
but I have not used those yet.
-I don't specifically use like ChatGPT or any sorts of AI,
but I do --
I'm sure like in some of the apps and applications
that I use, suggestions I get on YouTube, that kind of thing,
I am -- I am using AI. -I don't use it often.
We have a Google Home at my house,
and every now and then we would ask it random questions,
for example, what is the weather outside,
or what's the time?
But other than that, I'm not aware that I use AI very often.
-I use AI in a game called Dungeons and Dragons.
I'm a dungeon master, meaning I tell the story behind the game,
and sometimes I use it to write sections of that story.
-I have sometimes used AI for writing
and possibly like when I need to shorten an essay.
Every once in a while, I will use Grammarly's AI feature.
I've also used AI for giving ideas,
and, for example,
like if I need a picture that I'm not really good at drawing,
then I'll ask AI can you like draw this picture for me?
♪♪
-I mostly see AI used in the future to,
A, spread misinformation.
I've already seen much of that on the internet already,
and I -- however,
I also think it might be useful for doing things
that can revolutionize certain industries.
For example, we could completely replace certain industries,
such as the music industry,
or the acting industry, the writing industry.
All of those can be completely replaced by AI in the future.
-I think that, in the future, humans are going to try
and use AI to do as many simple tasks as possible
and, later, probably more complex ones.
AI is definitely becoming much more complex
and is being able to do more different things,
but I still feel that, at the moment,
humans are much more capable
and can understands things like feelings
that machines cannot.
-I think AI could help a lot of people
if it is designed correctly.
It could help people in nursing homes.
If it like is advanced enough,
it could be used for different -- like hearing aids,
or it could be used to help doctors perform surgeries
and just kind of over the world for multiple different things
if it's what it's like at its peak.
-So for the future AI,
there's a lot of potential because like even modern AI,
there's some bits that I could see having improvements.
And it's almost a little bit scary because,
if it can get improved enough,
then it could probably pretty accurately make
like fake images and stuff like that.
So I could see a lot of room for improvement,
and I feel like there -- it's most likely to happen,
especially with recent announcements
like the really realistic AI video generator.
♪♪
-I think the developers of AI
need to be thinking about maybe how child-friendly the AI is,
and maybe like even like
if a child is trying to use it to cheat on tests,
to try to use it to cheat,
maybe like thinking about like how the AI would respond.
Like if it's able to deduct,
oh, this is a question
that they're maybe not supposed to be asking.
-But the people who make AI
should really think about making sure
that people can recognize images as being made AI,
like watermarks,
something like that that can show AI generation because,
as much as I would like to cheat schoolwork
by AI generating stuff,
it's probably very unsafe and not great for the community
if people can just AI generate fake stuff
and pass it off as real or their own work.
-I think developers should focus on putting safeguards
into their AI
so that your average Joe can't just load into their --
to the app
and ask ChatGPT please say how floor tiles cause cancer.
-When people are developing technology,
they should probably consider
that not give these computers like the ability
to run themselves.
♪♪
[ Applause ]
-Hi, my name is Louise,
and I am a master of human-computer interaction
and design student at the University of Washington,
and today I have an immense pleasure
of introducing our very first speaker, Jay Cunningham.
So Jay Cunningham is a PhD candidate in the HCD program
at the University of Washington,
and he is the only student on the Board of Regents.
So driven by an impeccable sense of ethics and compassion,
as well as a strong commitment to social justice,
Jay approaches his work on AI and machine learning systems
from a holistically human-centric perspective,
and better yet a community-centric perspective,
where he approaches advancing equitable
natural language technological practices
for Black and African-American English speakers.
Now, through his many accolades, research fellowships,
and teaching positions,
what stands true throughout all of Jay's work,
in particular,
from my conversation with him this afternoon,
is just how much he cares about people.
This is seen through his active involvements
throughout many Seattle-based organizations,
as well as his upcoming seven-month travel fellowship,
where he will be traveling to countries like Nigeria
to study the transatlantic slave trade,
and this will better inform his research on responsible AI.
So without further ado,
I would like to give a very warm welcome to Jay Cunningham.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Wow, wow, wow, thank you,
thank you so much for that introduction.
Hello, everybody.
This is like a beautiful audience,
and I am super, super excited to be here with you today.
Again, I think everything that was shared about me
was pretty accurate,
but I am today going to just share about my journey
into responsible AI and my career.
And so, in UX research,
we use journey maps to convey user or users
or persona journeys through their experiences,
and today I'll take you on a journey of my career
in responsible tech innovation
and socially good civic engagement.
So I grew up in a small town called Artesia, Mississippi,
which is home to only about 400 residents,
most of many who are African American, low resource,
and I'm the West African descendant
of formerly enslaved people
who emerged from shadow slavery into sharecropping,
Jim Crow era,
and modern day community resource constrainment.
And Artesia was a site of a voter suppression incident
in 1876,
in which a group of heavily armed white men
came to intimidate Black voters.
And after about 500 Black residents fought back
against this,
this event was deemed as a Negro riot in events,
which was reported in the Jackson Times as people
who are devils to be fought with, with fire.
And so I want to make sure that we hold on to that.
And so for me, from a young age,
community activism and engagement
and civil rights has been super significant.
I've always been infatuated with consumer technology and AI.
And even though my family couldn't afford
these technologies,
I figured that if I went to college
and studied them that I had no way but to use them,
and building tech
would certainly put those things in my hand.
I was super, super involved in college and undergrad.
Went to University of Alabama,
and I was leader of many, many student organizations.
And you can tell by the many things that were on my chest
at that time, I was told that my neck was heavy.
But I think that my passion for civic engagement was really,
really significant, so much that I minored in it,
so much that my engineering professors told me
that I shouldn't have majored
and minored in civic engagement and computer science.
While I was studying engineering,
I felt so drawn to social justice issues of race,
equity, and inclusion,
but these disciplines felt so disconnected.
Topics about equity never really seemed to connect
with my computer science education.
Educating me on the stakes of technology and design,
I realized that, early on,
that being a production level software engineer
just wasn't for me.
I liked being around people.
And so after I worked at Lockheed Martin and Oracle,
where I found joy in coding,
but wanted to be in a role where I can influence what we,
as technologists build and furthermore as why, how,
and even should things exists at all.
Then I pivoted to being a product manager working
at Facebook and Microsoft. And while I really,
really enjoyed the experience much better,
the problems and products
that I worked on didn't quite compel me.
And I was, again,
way more interested in studying how people interacted
and were impacted by AI systems.
I made the brave decision to apply to a PhD program
and ended up here in Seattle.
I'd never been to Seattle before.
I didn't know I was getting myself into.
And again, a boy from Mississippi ending up here
was a really, really huge transition.
And my graduate research spans work in
critical technology practices and responsible AI systems,
specifically for marginalized users and communities.
And what I mean when I say critical technology practices,
I'm referring to these humanistic approaches
of innovating technology
that considers people and places the most marginalized,
underserved, countering bias, and harmful technologies.
And in much of my own research and work,
as mentioned earlier,
this work has specifically focused on advancing
responsible design of equitable automated speech recognition.
I got a little accent.
I got little Southern Mississippi drawl,
but I also speak African-American English.
And for me and other people in my community
that identify the way that I do,
experiences with voice technologies
are seemingly not equal and representative.
I've been fortunate to work at a couple of tech companies,
Microsoft, Apple, Google,
and with all those working on some of these same issues,
I'm super passionate about civic and community based
participation in stewarding a landscape
where technology is collaboratively designed
with the most marginalized
to shape a more justice-oriented future.
And so, for me, what does that mean?
And how I'm doing that here in Seattle?
It means I'm having the amazing opportunity
to recognize the importance of community input
and accountability in tech design.
I developed a Seattle-based Black community advisory board
at the University of Washington,
that brings together local Black community organizations
to the table to guide, lead,
and collaborate on work that promote tech equity,
given the innovation that happens right here
in our backyard
and the significance of involving communities
most impacted in that.
I'm on a mission to evangelize, in some ways,
and exemplify how we can shape responsible innovation,
especially in the era
where AI is rapidly being developed with loose safeguards
and where the tech industry reconsiders the notion of moves
fast and break things,
but also considers who are the people
and the places being broken in the process?
Much of my interest and work have centered this topic
in which I call Black community centered design,
where I've explored topics of anti-Blackness
and computing in social justice, Black users in fintech,
equitable speech recognition, and natural language processing,
and Black community participation and
technology innovation.
And so, needless to say, I'm pro-Black,
but I'm also pro-everyone, and I think that this is an experience
where I'm, you know,
often faced with this question of why Black people
or just Black communities?
While I'm sometimes seemingly exhausted
of answering that question, I'll still share.
John Lewis once said,
"If not me, then who? And if not now, then when?"
We know that technology experiences don't impact us all,
and I think that we should do something about that.
So I'm so fortunate to have worked
at many amazing organizations,
who are all prioritizing responsible AI across many axes.
And I'm really grateful to be pursuing my research and justice
oriented tech innovation independently through
the SSRC Just Tech Fellowship,
and supporting me of the new work that I do,
and also stewarding this work at an executive level
at the University of Washington as a student regent.
Looking forward,
I'm excited to pursue topics of responsible quantum
computing and community-based
data sovereignty and technology public policy.
I actually got a chance to co-write
and testify on a bill with a state senator on regulating
automated decision-making in the state of Washington.
And so looking forward to seeing
how these things impact us greatly.
This is my town.
So in reference back to my own community,
who again, in 1876,
Black Mississippians who were seeking radical change
and again referred to as devils to be fought with,
I hope that those
who seek to downtrodden humanity through power structures,
whether social or technical,
know that the bridges you burn
only light the way towards exposing pathways
for liberation for the most marginalized communities.
And this is surely a really,
really great nightmare for those -- for those individuals,
and the terror that they speak up
is only a reflection of the spirit and the battles
that they might face within. And so my journey in career
responsible AI has been a calling and is one
that I'm super, super fortunate to be a part of.
And again, thank you so much for having me here in this space.
-My name is Tanushree Padath.
I'm also in the MHCI+D program at UW.
It's my honor to introduce Alison Gazarek
from Intentional Futures.
Alison is a former high school teacher
whose work centers on equitable public schools
and student-centered solutions. At Intentional Futures,
her team sits at the intersection of social impact,
technology, strategy, and design.
She'll be presenting on her recent work
around socially responsible development
of emerging technology and AI.
So please give a warm welcome to Alison.
-How do biases in AI reflect biases in society?
And how can we understand them
to avoid repeating the mistakes of our past?
History is a series of choices
whether we choose action or inaction.
What we put in informs what we get out.
What if we started with better inputs
instead of mitigating what has never worked?
In 1950, Brown vs. Board of Education
passed in the Supreme Court,
effectively ending de jure segregation in schools
across the country,
but it took decades for cities to implement desegregation,
and Seattle was no exception.
Redlining and racist housing covenants led to
unequal resources and segregated schools across our city.
For years, local Black activists, churches,
organizations, and students demanded integration
through boycotts, protests, and creation of freedom schools.
And in 1971,
Seattle Public Schools became the first major
public school district in the country
to voluntarily implement desegregation
without a court mandate.
Citywide integration was this kind of audacious idea
that in order for education to be free and equal,
resources had to be shared across the district,
and that school quality could not depend on
the wealth and resources of a specific neighborhood.
It acted as a forcing mechanism
for the district to invest in schools equally,
which wasn't perfect.
The burden often rested on families of color
to acclimate to white spaces,
and white families left the district in droves.
This is me at Roosevelt High School.
My brother was bussed south to Garfield.
My parents were Seattle Public School's -- hi -- staff,
and my grandparents went to the same high school I went to,
and it's certainly where my passion
for public school equity was born.
Forty years later,
Seattle Public Schools is about as segregated
as it was 40 years ago.
In 2007, a group of parents took their case to the Supreme Court,
arguing that the race-based tiebreaker used to diversify
Seattle schools was, in fact,
discriminatory, and desegregation in Seattle schools
was effectively ended.
So what does this have to do with AI and innovation?
Well, one, like history, AI is only as good as its inputs.
It's a technology created to emulate human reasoning
and thinking,
but the data we input
to populate the large language models
we use pre-determines the outputs.
The largest LOMs are trained
on widely available Internet content, often biased.
For example,
I asked GPT-4 to create an image of someone presenting at MOHAI
at an event focused on AI,
and it shows this very nice white man who is not,
in fact, representative of -- I don't think --
anyone on our panel tonight. But it's not AI that's biased.
It's the inputs that we are using to train the AI.
Much of the conversation around equity and AI
has focused on mitigating bias,
which kind of feels like a car accident, to me.
Mitigation is cleaning up a mess.
And I would pose to you tonight
that that is absolutely the wrong question.
That creating an equitable AI models and then asking
afterwards how we mitigate inequity is nonsensical.
We have to create inputs for AI, and AI-enabled products,
that are in as inherently nuanced, diverse,
and complicated as we are.
The inputs predicate the outputs
and create a more representative free
and equal experience in the first place.
One example of this is a product like Latimer,
a large language model striving
to better represent the experiences of Black
and brown people,
which is being trained on data like oral histories,
Indigenous folk tales, and local archives,
starting with inputs that create more representative outputs.
Last fall, at Intentional Futures,
we partnered with local
nonprofit Equal Opportunity Schools
and used them as a case study for this very question.
How can AI be leveraged for equity?
We brought together a group of cross-sector experts
from venture capital, nonprofit, tech,
and philanthropy to dream big about what might be possible
and when technology is used to scale equitable impact.
EOS, for those who don't know,
works in public schools across the country,
using data to desegregate advanced course access
and shift adult mindsets.
They were founded right here in Seattle
in the context of our own school segregation
and inequal academic opportunities.
And their thesis is that, across the country,
segregation persists not just across cities,
but across school hallways.
Overwhelmingly, students in advanced courses
like Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate
are white and high income.
And overwhelmingly, in cities across the country,
students in on-level or remediated classes
are low-income students and students of color.
And EOS has this kind of revolutionary idea
or proven insight that actually the metrics
we're using to place students in these classes
are not predictive at all,
that GPA and test scores are not predictive
of student intelligence.
And in fact, other factors like student interest,
mindsets, and ambition are more predictive
of student success in advanced courses.
And relying on these outdated metrics
is keeping hundreds of thousands of talented students
out of advanced academic pathways.
The College Board uses a metric called AP potential,
which is a combination of grades and courses
in PSAT score to predict which students should take AP.
And EOS recently looked at students
that they had identified and placed in Advanced Placement
who passed the course.
And when they looked back at their AP potential scores,
80% of them were not identified with AP potential.
Knowing their potential impact,
EOS wanted to consider could emerging tech and AI
make their impact exponential, reduce bias,
and give teachers and administrators the tools
to compel them to create more equitable school environments
and to choose inputs
that create dramatically different outputs for students'
educational trajectories?
And exploring this question for themselves
and with this cross-sector experts,
EOS partnered with us
to create a rubric to guide equitable AI integration,
and we made a version for public use.
This rubric was intended to help guide them to create a platform
that could leverage AI for exponential equity,
but could also be used for other purpose-driven
organizations like many of you here.
We find ourselves at a really critical inflection point
where, like history,
we can decide to intentionally create the future we want,
rather than cleaning up the choices of our past.
We can choose to center students in the development
of technologies that will affect them
and train future models to reflect the rich diversity
of human experience in ways
that we have failed to do in the past.
The question is not how we mitigate AI, bias in AI.
It's how we create responsible technology in the first place,
and I sincerely hope you join us.
-Good evening, everyone.
Thank you for joining us here today.
My name is Samantha.
Likewise, same as my classmates from the MHCI+D program,
I'm pleased to be introducing Orlando Lugo tonight.
As the product manager at --
of Responsible AI and Tech at Salesforce,
Orlando specializes in the safety, accuracy,
and inclusivity of Sales Cloud AI developer tools
and internal AI applications.
Tonight, he will be sharing about
how AI is reshaping the future of work.
And when we were talking earlier,
Orlando was sharing with me that, for him,
this means hopefully a future
where AI frees us up to take more naps and take more walks,
a sentiment that I'm sure a lot of us share in the audience.
But beyond that,
he will also be challenging us to think about
what this reshaping means for society at large.
So please join me in giving a big warm welcome to Orlando.
-Well, it's an absolute pleasure to be here
with y'all today.
So I want to talk about the relationship
between AI and work.
AI is shaping labor.
Being led by large employers, we as workers and consumers
can play a role in ensuring AI benefits all of us.
All right, that's going to take -- okay,
so I moved to Seattle in 2014.
I worked in community engagement in public libraries.
That experience deeply shaped my career.
That's why you see this image up there.
And the message I want to leave you with,
with this slide,
is we can't just be passive citizens at this moment.
I work on responsible AI,
ensuring products are built with ethical principles
like accuracy, safety, honesty.
I get to shape AI products used for work,
so I see what we're up against that make AI work for us,
instead of working for the economic elite.
When asked what I do for a living,
people often joke about preventing robot takeovers.
My response, after taking a sip of beer,
usually, well, it's more
like I try to keep a small group of humans
from taking over the world.
While productivity gains, increased wages --
productivity gains increase, wages remain stagnant.
The productivity gains promised by AI
will not benefit workers by default.
US labor productivity has generally increased year
over year since the end of World War II.
Wages will continue to remain stagnant
without our intervention.
AI should be used to empower human capabilities.
There are some cases
where it is best to fully automate a process,
but there are other cases
where AI should play a supporting role to the human.
Over time,
the balance between human-AI interaction at work
will skew towards AI.
The skew towards more AI at work is clear.
The power of AI is being used to replace workers for profit
in our capitalist society.
Maximizing profits is nothing new, right?
What is new is how connected we are today
and how we can impact the future.
Like the Industrial Revolution,
AI is automating cognitive tasks,
shifting labor demands towards tech-driven roles,
demanding adaptability. Just as in the past,
this shift presents an opportunity
for growth and innovation, but also challenges
how we transition into this new reality.
We've shaped industry before all through the research,
advocacy, and proactive legislation
like automotive safety reforms of the past.
Today we can apply the same principles y'all,
enact proactive legislation
to ensure safety standards are integrated from the beginning.
AI can free us to focus on creative and strategic pursuits,
enhancing job satisfaction,
opening new opportunities for personal
and professional growth.
We face so many challenges.
We need human ingenuity and AI.
As AI transforms labor,
we must culturally shift how we view work.
AI's role isn't just about replacing tasks,
enhancing human capabilities, and creating new opportunities.
Embracing this change
requires redefining success and productivity,
focusing on collaboration between human intelligence
and artificial intelligence to foster a more dynamic,
inclusive, and innovative workplace.
The 40-hour workweek and working for a single employer
could all be reimagined, and they're all in flux
as gig work becomes more common.
It's a phenomenal opportunity to reimagine.
We need robust industry standards
and ethical guidelines to prevent exploitation
and ensure fairness in AI use.
I challenge all of us to advocate for regulations
that require transparency in AI systems,
mandatory audits before deployment.
We can redistribute efficiency gains to benefit everybody,
not just the economic elite.
AI and capitalism can coexist,
but redistribution efficiency gains require wages
that are tied to human AI productivity.
To make AI accessible and beneficial for all,
we need specific initiatives like subsidized AI education,
public access to AI tools,
and support for small businesses to adopt AI technologies
to compete with big business. It's awesome.
It's really awesome that you all are here to learn about AI.
It's super important to have a good understanding
of AI and its impacts.
I encourage you to learn prompt engineering,
discover which of your data
trains large language models to enhance your AI literacy.
And be a voice.
Urge your representatives to advocate for fair AI practices,
including government funding for non-commercial uses of AI.
Use promoting, yeah, promote non-commercial uses of AI.
Let's drive positive change in AI by supporting those
who do it right,
support businesses that prioritize ethical AI,
development by choosing companies committed
to responsible practices.
You help promote an industry standard
that values transparency, fairness,
and accountability by doing that.
Lastly, champion local AI projects, such as this one,
that tackle community issues.
Let's be intentional about shaping how AI impacts our work,
our lives, and our future. Thank y'all so much.
-Before we get started, I should probably come clean.
No one is more surprised than me
that I'm on a stage giving a talk in a format
I could hardly pronounce even three weeks ago about a topic
I admittedly know very little about.
When I told some of my friends what the topic was tonight,
I could almost feel some of them thinking, sis,
you should probably sit this one out.
[ Laughter ]
But then most of them also said,
in a voice barely above a whisper,
aren't you afraid of AI?
You know, I think this is a good question.
And so I'd usually respond, well, I don't know.
What are you so afraid of?
And they would say various things.
AI will take jobs, continue to not recognize Black faces,
or worse yet categorize us as non-human,
or -- this is my favorite --
that AI will be smarter than all of us,
and we'll all be its...
[ Laughter ]
Now, that last one,
I think is deeply connected to our overarching fear
that karma is coming for us.
But I'm told I don't have time to unpack that for you tonight
because these slides, they're going to keep on sliding.
But I am here to make a declaration in my full admission
of naivete that I am not afraid of AI.
I'm not unconcerned.
And I know I probably should be scared.
I mean, reading Dr. Joy Buolamwini's book alone
is enough to induce the night terrors,
but fear of AI,
it just feels like a bit of a magician's trick.
With sleight of hand,
we manage to shift blame for all of the ways
that we live out of alignment with our words,
and now those chickens, as they say, are coming home to roost.
We just clutch our pearls
when AI models expose the systemic sexism in hiring women,
or the racism that's built into policing in healthcare.
But AI is not the parent. It's the child.
And we are all hoping that AI will do as we say
and not as we actually do.
As a DEI expert,
I sometimes have occasion
to ask people whether they believe things
like racism or sexism actually exist,
and nearly always they say yes.
But when I ask if they actually know a racist or a sexist,
they nearly always say no,
except for, and this is an important exception,
except for the Thanksgiving racist uncle
that I continue to hear about.
I don't know if y'all all have the same uncle
or how that works,
but the truth is generative AI is much like
this proverbial or actual uncle.
It's unpredictable, doesn't always follow your rules,
and isn't always interested in your logic.
Now, if the truth is it's hard to hate each other up close,
well, AI also enables us to get
even further away from each other.
We are so often learning about one another from so far away
that all we can see are caricatures.
Our devices where AI often lives aren't going out of their way
to challenge our assumptions.
I mean, my Instagram feed completely agrees with me
that women's sports are better than men's,
purring cats is the best sound ever,
and coconut is an absolute abomination.
But what happens when it's more consequential than that?
What happens when disinformation combined with an algorithm
whose only job is to keep you engaged convinces you
that your neighbor is your enemy because they look, love,
or pee differently than you.
You should know that we're already exploiting
one another with AI.
Last year, Wire reported that, quote,
"From the Philippines to Colombia,
children are being paid pennies per task
to create AI training models used by some
of the largest companies on the globe."
And while I know that might be unsettling to hear,
we're already exploiting each other.
If you don't think so,
go check out the ways that our love of fast fashion
is impacting the shores of West Africa.
I don't know y'all.
Maybe AI will help reveal a truth about ourselves
we've yet been unwilling to face.
The people in my life who love me,
who really love me, love me enough to tell me the truth.
They force me to seek the other side of my opinions.
They stretch my perspective.
They remind me that my feelings and thoughts will lie to me.
They disagree with me.
They are both my biggest champions
and my biggest critics.
They remind me that it is better to be saved by criticism
than to be comforted with a lie.
They conspire with me to make me the best version of myself.
I can't just scroll away from them.
They are real.
We are real, and we're going to have to get real.
I am not afraid of AI.
I am afraid of us.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
-Thank you, Amelia, for that amazing talk.
It was truly, truly thought-provoking.
Good evening, everybody. My name is Aarushi.
I'm also one of honor students from the MHCI+D program.
It's my absolute pleasure to introduce
Africatown Community Land Trust and William Grose Center
for Cultural Innovation.
They both are based in the Seattle Central District
and pioneering initiatives aimed at countering
displacement and disenfranchisement
caused by gentrification.
ACLT focuses on acquiring
and developing land to foster homeownership opportunities
within Seattle's Black communities.
Simultaneously, the William Grose Center concentrates
on generating equitable opportunities in STEM
and creative entrepreneurship
for Seattle's Black youth and business owners.
Together they create a robust strategy
to preserve community identity
and enhance economic empowerment.
Echoes of Innovation explores the root of innovation
from the African diaspora to the Pacific Northwest,
focusing on African-American contributions
in the Central District.
This journey invites viewers to consider
how a holistic approach to creating truly inclusive
and generative spaces can benefit everyone
and not just a select few. So ladies and gentlemen,
please brace yourselves for a beautiful performance
by Melba Ayco and Rachel McKinney
of Northwest Tap Connection.
-My name is Melba Ayco.
I'm Miss Mel, but for most people know me,
I'm the director of Northwest Tap Connection,
and I'm here in partnership with Africatown.
And that definitely I'm going to start off by saying that,
you know, I don't know a whole lot about AI,
to be honest with you,
but I've been reading up on it.
But a lot of the things that I've seen I haven't really liked
because I'm a person of Gullah Geechee culture,
and I can't even get Alexa to understand what I'm saying,
okay? So many times, I unplug her.
I talk about that
when we're talking about the stories of Black
and brown people that historically I'm a woman
that was born into segregation,
survived immigration, and then moved to Seattle
to find cultural diversity.
People still don't understand when I say
that I'm a Gullah Geechee, a Louisiana Gullah Geechee,
born in the township
where Plessy vs. Ferguson was established,
the Grand Dragon of the KKK in my neighborhood.
My concern about when we talk about this type of technology,
what are they going to use to describe my grandchildren?
How many years have I fought for my grandchildren to be equitable
and that when it's all said and done,
what technology is going to define us?
Will it be white lies or whitewashing
of the people who we are?
And I think that's the critical piece that we're talking about.
When I talk to Africatown,
they inform me that they were looking at innovation.
Oops, I hit something. I'm okay? You're sure?
All right. They talked about innovation.
I asked Rachel come with me
so that you could understand what innovation is.
Innovation is the ability to look
and see something from a different lens,
to create something that is inclusive of all sounds.
Tap is a dance that comes from protests,
and with that dance, though, you have rhythm patterns
that you can get into that changes the dynamic.
She's going to hit a couple of them for us.
And I'm sorry if I'm a little bit off of school
because when they got to AI, I'm going to tell y'all,
I was already upset.
And then when she got up before me, I was really troubled.
Okay? Go on and hit it. Hit a couple for me.
♪♪
Let me tell y'all something.
You notice that?
You heard several rhythm tap, but they were all tap steps.
It defines that when we're look at a people,
you cannot judge a people by one person that you know.
Somebody got a friend, so they know all about us.
I got a friend,
and my friend may be a little different
because people are like the sounds that come from tap.
Tap is a dance form that is historically rooted in protest.
When drums was outlawed, we took to our tap-dancing feet,
our body-hitting and slamming.
When we look at -- I want to talk about innovation,
innovation is what we're talking about with our young people
that is out of what Africatown is.
Asking young people not to look so much at what we hear
on social media,
not to be defined by what we hear on the news,
but to think inside of yourself as to who you are
and where you want to be and what you want to do.
These are the steps that we're talking about.
These are the echoes of innovation and truth.
Africatown, and this is rooted in that central area,
where there's so many stories that have been untold.
And yet our children need to hear it.
Whether it's told by AI, I don't know.
But if you're going to have AI, tell our story.
Please get it right.
My name is Miss Melba, that nappy hair Gullah Geechee,
so when you introduce me,
make sure you give me my props that way.
When we talk about the stories of Seattle,
its pioneers,
and how we have struggled for the very name of the place
that we're talking about.
It's innovation.
And innovation for our children need to start with knowing
that it's possible, that it's there.
It's a view.
As I said, again, if you're using AI,
I'm not mad at you
because I understand you save money when you're using it.
You can even --
if we can correct it and really educate AI about the diversity
that sits in the city of Seattle,
can you imagine what that would mean for us?
What that would look like?
I wouldn't have to hear on the news
that Rosa Parks sit on the bus,
but I can say that she was a Black woman.
How empowering that would have been for my little children
and my grandchildren to hear it. So definitely,
as we start to look at the William Grose Center,
what they're really doing is raising up a generation
that thinks outside of the box.
And AI is definitely a part of that legacy going forward.
But I just really challenge us all to hold it accountable,
to hold it accountable to the truth
so that we don't continue this continuously fact
of having miseducation, miscommunication,
and misinteraction between us,
as we look at having things in common.
Building upon the past.
Knowing the history.
Honoring those challenging pioneers
that are creators and forms of artistic and social expression.
I often tell people that, in this world,
we live on a hamster,
that little wheel that goes round and round.
And every 30 to 40 years, something comes in,
and it's about the same as what we heard before.
When I look at this piece that we did,
we shouldn't be talking about what's happening with police
and Black communities and other communities right now,
but it's always
like it's continuously turning and coming back.
When we talk about the protests
that happened with Black Panthers,
there was really a movement here in this city of Seattle,
we shouldn't have to be talking about this conversation in 2024.
We should be further along.
I feel sometime that there's a table,
and they're looking at us down here saying let's see
if they get it right this time.
Innovation helps you to get it right.
It helps you to think outside of the box.
It tells you to think from the perspective of someone else.
This is a timeline of the city of Seattle,
and that center area with people who are doing making changes.
Africatown is a part of that.
What they're really talking about
is correcting those miseducations of what was taught
about Black people in our history,
changing the white lies and whitewash of it is critical
because imaging and self-esteem and self-knowledge
of who you are, regardless of race, agenda,
that's an important part for all children,
and we're striving to make a difference there.
I'm Northwest Tap Connection,
but it is important for me to say that I stand in solidarity
with Africatown because we need to make sure
that we have our young people ready for the next generation.
I think we're almost -- my music, play it, girl.
Thank you so very much. I love her.
I want you to remember, for many of you,
you think that this song is called Make Me Wanna Holla.
This song is called Inner City Blues.
I love this song, and I challenge you to think about it.
It's 51 years in the making, 51 years in playing,
but yet it's as relevant today as the day
that Marvin Gaye recorded it.
Something's wrong there.
If you can use AI to change that narrative,
hell, yeah, I'm all for it.
My name is Miss Melba,
that nappy-haired Gullah Geechee Creole, born and raised,
rooted on the north shore of New Orleans,
in the small town of Covington, Louisiana,
Black Seminole, Creole, Chahta, peace out, y'all.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
[ Cheers and applause ]
-It is now my honor
to bring Superintendent Chris Reykdal to the stage.
Superintendent, I know, let's give it up for Chris
because he is a transformational
and visionary leader with a career in public education
and an unwavering commitment to doing what is
right for students.
Chris Reykdal, thank you. -Here's the good news for you.
They'd never let an elected official try
to do something in 6 minutes and 40 seconds timed,
so we'll do it in slightly less than that.
The ask of me was to come up and reflect a little bit,
and I first want to thank everyone here for being a part
of something that, if you haven't experienced before,
you now know is such a beautifully complex
and unique and inspiring way of thinking about things.
The heart and the soul
and the curiosity of middle schoolers
saying I think I know something,
and I'm not sure I know something about it,
to the absolute conviction of our latter speakers
who said I've seen hurt before.
And if we don't get this right, we'll hurt again.
That is exactly what this is about.
So thank you again to MOHAI,
to the Board of Directors,
and to leadership
to bring this kind of conversation to this space.
I was, yeah, please, give it up for them.
I want to give you a frame
that we think about a lot in public education
and child development
because I think the following four folks
that you're going to hear from
are going to bring you more curiosity and more conviction,
more inspiration and hope sometimes.
But I want you to think about the way
we think about a lot of this,
which is the science of hope.
And some of you know this,
but it's --
I'll just give you the simplest component parts
because maybe you can use it as a lens.
And as educators, we're always thinking about those lenses.
So it's really about empowering our young people
to think about goals and goal setting,
and where are they going?
To imagine for themselves something
that they can create, right?
So that's the first part of the science of hope
is where are you going? And the second part is agency.
Do you have the tools and the resources and the opportunities?
Do you know where to get what you need to navigate that path?
Have you been empowered to do that?
And do we know how to go find those resources if you don't?
So goal setting and then empowerment through agency.
And then the last part, sometimes the hardest.
We all hit roadblocks. Everyone hits roadblocks.
So we teach our students,
and we teach into these ideas of do you have resiliency?
Can we teach you the skills of feeling resistance and setbacks
and knowing how to build the resources to overcome that
because you've got your goal in mind,
and you've been taught the skills of acquiring agency?
So if it helps you to think about that,
in this context, I would challenge you to do that,
because a million kids in the state of Washington
are increasingly being asked a little bit about like
where are you going?
And what tools do you have?
And when you hit resistance,
how are you going to build the strategies around that?
So I think that will be helpful.
Here's the last thing I will say that I hope is quite hopeful.
You're in the state in which I offered guidance.
I was one of the first five in the nation
on artificial intelligence to our schools.
In the past, if you talk to educators,
and we have some in the room,
they'll say another thing that runs me over
and consumes my time in schools.
I can't do this right now. This is very different.
Generative AI is the creation of new knowledge
that isn't particularly new,
except that it sits in so many billions of parts
that it's never been brought together.
That's a hopeful thing, but you got to teach into it.
So other states are thinking about this
in terms of like here's another tool and how do we use it?
And in Washington, we're saying it's coming.
Let's be prepared.
Let's think about it like we would any technology,
the power to create in such beautiful ways,
and the power to hurt if it's not done well.
So we are the only state, though,
to pair it with a second effort right now,
which is we are rebuilding our learning standards,
particularly in English language arts.
This will hit our librarians in time.
By the way, librarians are amazing.
Please help them and protect them everywhere.
And eventually in the social sciences and other areas,
but we're actually changing our learning standards
because what we have learned for 20 or 30 years
is this is a place of incredible innovation in the northwest
and sometimes technology does to us.
But in order to empower students,
they have to know what's in those algorithms.
They have to know what's in that box.
So we're really leaning into this idea that information,
digital literacy, misinformation, and ultimately,
AI literacy is an intentional practice in a state.
That's what we're building towards.
So as we create, and we innovate,
and we empower students, and they have agency,
it isn't just a tool they use.
They're asking questions like
why did it spit out what it spit out?
How do I know all the implicit bias in that?
Who built that code?
Why is it running me down, and every time I click on something,
it gives me four more things just like what I clicked?
Is it reinforcing what I already believe,
or is it challenging me to believe something different?
We can't let it be an accident
that this AI innovation changes the world.
It has to be an intentional practice.
So you're in a state that's trying to do that
with learning standards,
beginning with five-year-olds
to get them to be thinking critically about it.
And as I say,
and I hope it helps you to think about it this way,
I don't want to raise a generation of cynical thinkers.
I want to raise a generation of critical thinkers,
and we can do that.
So it is my distinct pleasure to kick
off the second half of this.
I think you are going to find it inspiring.
You've already been inspired,
and there's going to be a great little exercise after this
because we're educators,
so we got to do a little reflection together.
So we're going to do that.
It is my pleasure to introduce Baylee Sinner.
Baylee is a film producer and director.
She's worked in advertising,
creating films for brands like Amazon, Microsoft,
and our beloved Seattle Seahawks.
And more, it is currently in --
she's in distribution for her award-winning documentary film,
Where the Rope Ends.
Baylee will discuss her integration of AI tools
into her filmmaking processes and explore the role of AI
and the future of filmmaking.
Please welcome Baylee.
-So, yes, my name is Bailey. I am a producer director.
We're going to be talking about AI and filmmaking.
So the first part of the presentation
is we're actually going to do a mock project,
utilizing some of the AI tools that I use every day.
And then the second half,
we're going to talk about some of the exciting things going on
with AI in the big world of Hollywood.
So a little bit about me,
I've been born and raised in Washington.
I've been surrounded by a lot of the amazing innovative companies
that are here, and now I get to make advertisements for them,
which is really awesome. And then, yeah,
I just released my first feature-length documentary,
so we're in the middle of distribution.
I'm going to film festivals.
Just got approved for a national PBS broadcast,
which is pretty exciting.
Thank you. The story is about Nichole,
a local woman that was canyoneering,
and she made a mistake
and fell 60 feet onto a rock ledge and survived.
She was rescued by Snohomish search and rescue,
by helicopter, and this film took about seven years to make.
So this is a picture of me when I first started making it.
Just kidding. This was made by AI.
But had I been using AI tools,
I don't think it would have taken seven years.
I think that quite a few years could have been shaved
off using tools like ChatGPT to really build the story
and really hone in on the vision.
So let's start with going into our interview.
So normally, when I go into an interview,
I would write down all of my interview questions.
But this time, what I would do instead
is write down what I want to hear.
So I know I want a story about this.
I know I want some more thematic dialogue about this.
So really thinking through the vision
because when you're doing interviews,
the wording of a question is so important.
So I'm going to plug that into ChatGPT
and say come up with some questions.
So this is what it did.
And so these questions are prompting the kind of response
that I want.
So it's prompting a story.
It's prompting more deep-level thinking.
And this is something that could also be used
if you're interviewing a potential employee, for example.
So then we go. We do our interviews.
After we do our interviews,
we're going to transcribe them using a platform like Rev.
So that turns it into a script that you can work from,
which is, in my opinion,
a really helpful way to then build a story.
So we have our hours and hours
of script content, and then I already have,
in my head, a vision of how I want the story to play out,
Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. And so what I'm going to do
is I'm going to plug in that outline into Chat GPT
and then copy and paste those hours and hours and hours
of interviews, and it's going to reorder it into this outline.
So this is huge.
This is one of those processes
that would have shaved years off of making the film.
We had 32 different just paper edits of what the film was
before we then brought it into post-production.
And so this process,
we can have a version spit out almost instantaneously
is just completely streamlines filmmaking.
So then we have our film in paper form.
What we're going to do is say come up with our shot list.
So it's going to come up with a huge list of scenes
that then we need to film.
And when I was practicing this, I said, here's our budget,
we have a certain amount of locations,
we have this many characters, so it works with those parameters.
And then of course, you refine it from there.
Then we move on to the storyboarding phase.
So this is something that typically is very expensive
and very time-consuming.
I didn't do it for my project because of those reasons.
But with resources like DALL-E, which is through ChatGPT,
you can describe what you're looking for,
and it'll instantly spit out an image.
So these on the right are real images from the film.
And having a tool like this
just really allows you to think through your vision,
whether it's filmmaking or whatever industry
that you're in,
rather than -- and being able to communicate it to your team.
So I can show them these images to help figure
out what kind of equipment we need,
what our framing is, all of that.
Then jumping ahead into the editing,
I used a composer for our music,
which I would definitely do again.
But that being said,
there's some pretty interesting tools coming out.
So this, you can describe what kind of a song that you want,
and it'll spit out a song that, if you have a paid membership,
you actually have license to use.
And you can actually put those songs on Spotify,
I recently learned, which I was very surprised by.
All right, so that was our mock project.
Now we're going to move on to the exciting things
going on in Hollywood.
Exciting things coming up, AI voice licensing.
All right, so let's say you have a child actor
whose voice is well known for their character.
They're eventually of course going to age out of that voice,
but they have hours and hours of recordings.
And so what they can do is they can translate that
into an AI voice
and then license that for future projects.
So that's something that is going on
in the Nickelodeon Disney world right now.
Scriptbook, this is a new platform
where you can put a script into it,
and it will predict the box office success of that film.
So producers are using this before they go in
and green-light and go into pre-production with the film.
And it also targets --
shows you who the target audience is going to be,
who you need to market it to.
Roadrunner is a documentary on Anthony Bourdain.
It was released in 2021.
Anthony Bourdain passed away in 2018.
There's a scene
where he is narrating some emails that he wrote,
but that voice -- his voice was never actually recorded.
That was made with AI,
so that was something that was pretty controversial, actually.
This is Robert De Niro in Irishman.
He has character spanned over five generations.
And so, normally, with this kind of aging technology,
you would have facial trackers, bunch of equipment on you which,
as you can imagine,
it's hard to deliver a good performance with that.
But now, using AI and a mixture of CGI,
they take footage of Robert De Niro
from when he was actually 40
and use that to influence the aging technology.
So it's way more accurate
when you look at the lines on his face,
how his face moves, all of that.
So it's just making things more authentic,
and you can really tell a difference in the way
that these films are being produced now.
Okay, that's it.
So we're having a lot of screenings for
Where the Rope Ends throughout Washington
and virtually as well.
This is the version that was not made by AI,
but hopefully my next film will have a lot of support,
and it won't take seven years.
So thank you.
-Awesome, thank you so much, Baylee.
That was very insightful and mind-blowing.
I personally have watched the movie
Where the Rope Ends, and I love it.
So this is really mind-blowing to me, and I just love it.
But, yeah, thank you so much for that wonderful talk.
And good evening, everyone.
My name is Han Feng, and guess what?
I'm also honor student from MHCI+D program.
So today, I will actually be having the honor
to introduce Stefania Druga from Google AI.
So basically today we will be learning
about the discovery process of how multimodal AI,
the powerful integration of text, image, and audio,
and analysis could significantly contribute
to the social impact from diverse areas,
such as education,
combating misinformation, accessibility solutions,
content creation, and so much more.
So without further ado,
let's please welcome the wonderful Stefania Druga.
[ Applause ]
-I'm going to talk today about multimodal AI for social impact,
lots of big words.
So how many of you have used ChatGPT or DALL-E?
Can I see a show of hands?
Okay, so we know what AI is, probabilistic automation,
but multimodal basically means AI
that can work with lots of different inputs and outputs.
So going beyond text, processing images,
processing video games, processing sounds.
And I start working in AI in 2016
and built a platform to teach AI to kids,
which is featured here on the right side.
It was building on top of scratch,
and it was allowing young people K-12,
like the ones we saw in the beginning,
to train their own models
and use their custom models in games.
Since 2016, until now, AI became mainstream.
And as you all got to play with these tools,
so did many other people,
and it became controversial when an AI-generated piece of art
won a competition.
So the artist started building their own tools
to prevent AI models from copying their images,
like the tool showed here, Glaze.
And there are lots of questions
that are currently being asked around impact of AI on --
in the creative space,
like the examples we saw from Baylee before,
and also around policy and copyright law.
So in US, as of now,
all of the works that are being created
and generated by AI are not protected by copyright law.
So you still need to hire a human,
even if they use DALL-E or any other tool to generate content.
However, in New Zealand, for example,
that is not the case.
Artifacts created by AI are copyrightable.
So I really wanted to understand like where do we draw the line?
And how do people use these tools?
So when generative AI became mainstream,
I did this paper with what I called prompt artist.
So these were people like Daniel Smith,
who develop his own style.
So he used image generation to actually have commentary,
right, on climate change.
So he was creating these images as a polar bear in the desert
or a gorilla freezing and images
that we were not able to easily express before
to create an important social message.
This is also coming to makers,
and prompts are now like crafting materials.
So this is an example from Instructables,
which is one of the largest communities for makers,
where people can just input an image or take a picture,
something that inspires them,
transform that into a 3D model and 3D print it.
And it also really impact industrial design.
You can prototype much faster.
Let's say you have a table,
and you want to explore all possible designs
for a specific type of table, have some constraints,
but explore different styles
and be able to more quickly prototype
these different designs.
We talked about movie just before.
I wonder how many of you recognize
where this image comes from and if you could shout out loud?
Yeah?
That's right.
Did you know this was done with AI?
So this particular image with the stones
was done with Runaway ML, which is --
was the first tool for video generation,
and it actually became like part of a movie that won the Oscars.
Now, there is a really big question around co-creation.
How much do we do?
How much do we delegate to these tools,
right, when we make music,
when we do 3D design, when we -- when we write?
There's like an example of this ghostwriter.
You could actually have generative AI
in the physical space.
We have -- we've seen examples of media generation.
There's an entire episode of Planet Money podcast
that was generated by AI and narrated by AI.
There's actually a theater play in Czech Republic
that was entirely written by AI and performed by people.
And we also see a lot of impact in education.
And this is my -- the core of my research,
where this promise of having personalized tutors.
For example,
Khanmigo from Khan Academy was just launched,
and it's really leveraging multimodal AI
because for a math education,
you can scribble equations and get feedback in real time.
But I start studying this impact of AI on education
and help kids and people learn about AI back in 2016,
like I told you,
and what I learned is that it's very important,
on top of creating these applications,
to explain to people how the technology works.
We've seen applications of AI in climate change,
from being able to process now satellite imagery
and doing better prediction and for hurricanes.
We're getting fires, again, in Seattle this summer.
I'm sorry for the bad news, right?
And [indistinct] just launched new models for this.
We also see new applications in medicine.
When we are able to correlate like my sleep data
together with my running data, clinical data from the doctor,
I will have much more accurate diagnostic.
Of course, the question of data governance is still a big one.
An example of initiative from Open Humans is
how we can control who accesses the data?
Who doesn't? Who gets access to the model?
I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there.
However, existing studies on breast image --
breast cancer imaging, for dementia detection,
where we use custom-trained multimodal AI shown very,
very promising results.
Another one is drug discovery. We've seen studies that show
that multimodal AI could be used for better analysis
of complex data at a chemical level to do drug discovery.
Same goes for material science
when we could go at very different levels
of analysis for the data.
Also analyzing all the patents that have been filled
and cross reference like experiments with reviews
of existing products and existing materials.
Another one that I really is very close to my heart
because I speak several languages,
and I lived in many parts of the world,
is using multimodal AI for language preservation.
So we have a lot of languages
that are spoken by very few people.
So we could use these large models
to preserve those languages.
Same goes for cultural heritage.
There's two examples here from Romania.
One is the use of LiDAR and AI technology
for scanning these ancient trees
so people can actually visit them later even
when the trees are gone or scanning old monuments
or scanning old scrolls.
So I think a lot of this work needs to be done with all of us.
There are lots of risks and challenges,
but also promising avenues for AI ahead of us.
So thank you so much.
[ Applause ]
-Hi, everyone.
I'm Uma, also one of Ana's students,
and it is my absolute honor to introduce our next speaker,
Onur Bakiner from Seattle University.
Onur is a political scientist researching
and teaching human rights,
AI ethics, and technology governance.
His past research has involved studying
how societies address past wrongs.
Currently, he has been working on a book project
exploring AI governance models.
Please join me in welcoming Onur Bakiner.
-Hello, everyone, good to see you all.
I'm an academic, so I present like an academic.
Be ready to read a lot of things in the next seven minutes.
And with that, let's go.
All right, so AI problems are not just AI problems.
I would like to argue that the social, economic,
political, cultural roots of our problems
that are sort of embedded in today's technologies
should be addressed
for us to actually address the technologies
that come with the tech -- with AI and AI tools.
So a little bit of demystifying AI is essentially about,
well, certain ways of collecting, storing,
and analyzing data.
And with that comes a lot of problems in the form
of bias and discrimination,
especially in automated decision-making,
as well as other problems, you know,
that were discussed, such as disinformation,
privacy rights violations, and so on, and so forth.
And, of course,
the technical aspect is very important to unpack here.
But also, you know, to think a little bit more big picture,
think about the social, political, economic,
cultural roots of the -- of these problems.
Now, what sort of solutions are proposed to tackle AI
are so technical, you know, debiasing, watermarking,
auditing, also a lot of AI for social good projects.
And definitely, they have a very important role to play
if we are going to address sort of the technical problems
that AI and AI applications produce.
Related to that are, well, you know,
open sourcing and some sort of business oversight.
So, you know, some sort of self-regulation
by companies is seen as another governance model
that is important to address,
you know, many of the sort of problematic aspects of AI.
And perhaps in one final thing
to add to that will be legal regulation, you know,
the European Union's AI Act,
or, you know, talk of federal regulation in the US,
more action at the state level.
These are all very important components
of a governance solution.
But at the end,
we need to go to the root of the problem
with modern technologies, in great part,
because I think ordinary individuals and communities
feel very much alienated by what AI sort of brings.
Part of it is this idea that it's an expert field,
that, you know, many of us are mystified by what it does.
Now, that is one,
but there are also other routes or other causes of alienation.
So a second one would be the fact that, you know,
today's data and algorithms sort of, you know,
or the producers of AI technologies tend to own them.
And so even those experts who could do assessments are,
you know, unlikely to actually have access
to the data and algorithms.
So that adds another layer of alienation
between the production and use of AI and most of us.
Despite all the talk of startups,
there is a high degree of market concentration
in the technology sector.
So those who can actually produce,
those with the compute power, the data warehouses,
the sort of the additional funding and investment
tend to be relatively small numbers of businesses.
And to add to that,
there is a research and development
gap that is both global but also
within countries in terms of
how a private business now actually can recruit top talent.
And so our standard sort of mechanisms
of controlling technology through democratic means
or through universities are being eroded.
And to add to that, of course,
you know, the workplace still is a fairly undemocratic place.
So most people if they are participating
in today's economy, as workers,
you know, they are handed down decisions.
They don't get to take part in decisions.
So what I'm offering here is a radical democratic model.
With radical, what I mean is from the roots,
so basically addressing social, political,
economic, cultural problems from the roots
and questioning all the hierarchies in order
to build a better future with so much technical progress.
Now, I know that whenever I say, you know,
we should challenge experts, maybe, you know,
light bulb goes in -- goes in everybody's heads,
you know, do we really want, you know,
anybody to challenge any kind of expertise?
Obviously, we're here talking about sort of a model
of cohabitation between experts and non-experts.
And that can be done through multiple mechanisms.
One, organizing, so community organizing, NGO organizing.
I think that -- this is one of the main mechanisms
through which we can push back against some
of the sort of the worst abuses of technology companies
and build a sort of safer, more responsible technology sector.
The second one is learning.
I think, in today's world,
we all have to be literate in multiple things.
You know, data literacy, science literacy, you know,
they all have taken a different meaning.
So we need to go beyond that,
and we need to have a more comprehensive education.
And I guess that's where educators come in.
Something else we need to do is participate, participate,
not only in elections,
but also, you know, obviously, you know, in the --
at the -- at the local level, at the state level,
at the international level,
as well as in the workplace in decisions that affect our lives,
technological or otherwise.
Something that -- something else that I would like
to bring up is that we should approach technology
with an ethics of care.
That is to say,
take the position of those
who are most likely to be marginalized, excluded,
wronged by technology,
rather than sort of take this attitude
of wanting to be winners in this -- in this game of technology.
I think that is absolutely fundamental.
And finally, we want safe, responsible technology
that actually works, that actually solves human problems.
And so in cases where this doesn't happen,
I think we also have a right to resist technology
that doesn't serve, you know, human ends.
So in the end, you know, we're living in a time --
at a time
where an electoral democracy is perhaps hanging by a thread.
What hope is there that we can have something more direct?
I don't know.
I think every day that I communicate with younger people,
and that's most days, I'm filled with hope.
And, you know,
every time that I see organizers who work in this field,
I'm also filled with hope.
And you know, that is the root of my hope.
So I think a better future is not straightforward,
but it is possible.
Thank you.
-So thank you so much for that very extensive talk,
discussing the kinds of attitudes
we should adopt in terms of growing with AI.
And so last, but certainly not least,
I would like to introduce Dr. Jamar Montgomery,
who is a highly respected interdisciplinary individual,
known for his comprehensive background in politics,
law, technology, and education.
Having previously run for the US Senate
for the state of Louisiana
and served as a juvenile public defender,
Dr. Montgomery possesses a keen understanding of
how policies really impact communities and individuals
across the nation.
He's deeply passionate about raising awareness on
both the potential
and the risks of the real world applications of AI
in modern society.
And so without further ado,
please give a very warm welcome to Dr. Jamar Montgomery.
[ Applause ]
-Before we get started,
my wife told me don't get up here
and bore these people with a long, boring speech.
So, you know, the best stories start off with,
so I was at this Illuminati party.
All right, let's go.
So I'm at the World Economic Forum,
and I'm speaking with the global elite about AI,
and I started getting upset because they're talking about AI
as if it's somewhere out there,
as if AI isn't already affecting our lives.
And I'm sitting here,
you got some of the world's top companies,
companies like Palantir, Google, that are there,
companies that are working with special operations to help,
to hunt terrorists, to fight against crime,
to do all these great things in society,
being able to identify people who are going to hurt you.
And then I started thinking, goodness gracious,
this is Big Brother.
This is technology that can be used in a way
that discriminates against people,
as in what we call predictive policing,
which is used currently in New Orleans and Miami.
Utilizing this technology in such a way,
where instead of you being the gears,
we now become the grease of a machine
that's much bigger than us, much more powerful than us.
It led me to believe that many of us have been looking at AI
through this very fearful lens
as in AI is this big,
scary thing that is going to take over the world,
that is going to make you irrelevant,
that is going to erase your history.
But who decides whether something is good
or if something is evil?
Are we allowing large tech companies to determine
what is good or evil?
Are we allowing large organizations
and political organizations to determine what is good or evil?
Are we leaving that up to AI?
The next challenge that I realize is that the one element
that we have been leaving out of this entire equation
is the human element.
We aren't afraid of the technology.
We're afraid of each other.
It is each other who determines how that technology is applied.
So if we, as humans,
are not applying this technology in a responsible manner,
we'll have things like deepfakes,
where, hey, I'm going to utilize your face
and now be able to get into your Facebook account,
get into your phone,
or how about I utilize this technology
to now recreate historical experiences
so that you can now have a more immersive experience?
Or we're now worried about hate speech.
But isn't AI just uncovering what is already
there and showing us?
So if we want to have a better world
where we don't have hate speech,
then we have to tame our tongues and the speech that we have.
We talk about AI eliminating jobs,
but what about in economies that are developing
that can onramp much more quickly
than industrialized societies
who are trying to figure out how to use this technology?
They say that the mother of all innovation is necessity,
and necessity is something that these economies have.
Well, we can talk about these different tools.
We got ChatGPT and Claude and finding out about Latimer,
which is a new AI that I didn't know anything about.
But when we start to understand how these technologies work,
we realize that these technologies only give
us what we give it.
We can talk about the ethics of artificial intelligence,
and we should do this responsibly,
but what does responsibly mean?
I challenge all of us to think about
we should embrace the dangers of AI.
Our ethics will determine what we believe,
and our ethics will determine how we react.
They say that education is the most powerful weapon
which you can use to change the world.
I'm not worried about how people use AI.
I'm worried about how people think about AI in their lives.
If you are not educated on these particular things,
you're going to be in a situation
where you have global inequality.
We tie that education to this inequality,
those who know about AI and those who don't,
those who know how to prompt engineer
and those who don't,
thus, adding to this inequality that we have said
that we want to fight against.
We can talk about regulations,
but if it -- the only people
who are making the regulations are people who are at the top,
they're not making the regulations for those
who are at the bottom, those who may be disenfranchised,
those who may not be represented.
So when we talk about regulations and understanding
that we have a responsibility to pull one another
up on the challenges that we face
and utilizing this particular --
this particular technology to make the world a better place.
We talk about, once again, that innovation,
that spark, that thing that allows
for us to bring new ideas to life.
Are we allowing this innovation to shine bright
in the darkest places? To find that innovation
where others have not had access to it?
But many of us are worried about Skynet.
I'm not worried about Skynet. I talk nice to my ChatGPT.
You should talk nice to yours.
But when we think about AI,
again, it's has this weaponized connotation to it.
But what about the great things that AI can provide for us?
What are how it can be a tool for mass generation,
for generative AI,
where we're creating new artworks,
new works of literature, new ways of thinking,
new ideas, tying different ideas together?
Or are we going to utilize this technology for mass destruction?
Our challenge is not how to use this technology
in an ethical way.
Our challenge is to change our own internal ethics
so that we became the change-makers of tomorrow.
Thank you.
-Once again, thanks to the organizing committee
that helped us put this event together,
all of the volunteers that helped with the event
this evening, and also, back to how I started,
which is thanking all of you,
and especially for sticking around for the entire event.
Without the audience and the participation,
this ends in the -- this ends right here.
You guys get to take the conversation forward,
which is the whole point of these events
is to get a new way of looking at something
and help us go out and create the future history
that we'd like to see.
So with that. -Yeah.
I think when we -- when we created this event,
we had the goal of trying to make --
to leverage this as an opportunity
to make change happen and come, take what you heard tonight
and share it and spread it.
So, again, thank you so much for helping make this event
a conversation and a real experience,
and thank you so much. -Good night.
[ Cheers and applause ]