Three Tuesday nights with Jeff Eyet, UC Berkeley lecturer and co-founder of the Berkeley Innovation Group.

Dates: October 6, 13 and 20
Time: 6:30 – 8:00 p.m.
Location: LOPC, 49 Knox Drive, Lafayette, CA 94549

AI Parenting Workshop Series Overview

Your teenager is already using AI. The question is whether they’re calling the shots or just accepting the first response they get.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania ran a study with nearly a thousand high school math students, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. One group got open access to ChatGPT during practice. Their practice scores jumped 48 percent. Then the tool was taken away for the exam, and that same group scored 17 percent worse than the students who never touched it. A second group used a version built with safeguards. They came out even with the students who never used AI at all.

Same tool. Same kids. Different result, based on how it got used. And here’s the part that got me: neither group could tell. The kids who did worse didn’t think they’d learned less. The kids who broke even thought they’d done better.

Try this at dinner tonight. Ask your kid what the AI got wrong, and how they caught it. If the answer is “nothing,” nobody’s checking. That’s the whole problem in one question, and we spend three weeks on it.
Each workshop stands on its own and is limited to 50 attendees. Come to one or come to all three.

Oct 6. The homework looks better. That doesn’t mean they learned it. How to tell the difference, and what to ask when you can’t. That study was math, where an answer is right or wrong. Nobody’s run it on essays yet, and essays are where most of our kids are using this.

Oct 13. When everybody uses the same tool, everybody’s work starts to look the same. So, what still makes your kid stand out? We’ll also get into agents, which are AI tools that go do things instead of just answering.  It’s a different conversation when the AI can take actions on your behalf.

Oct 20. What to actually do about it at home. The guardrails in that Penn study were built into the software by researchers. You can’t install those. But you can set rules that work the same way. That’s this night. Specific rules, by age, that you can hold to on a school night.

On ages. Middle school and high school aren’t the same conversation. A 7th grader mostly shouldn’t be leaning on this stuff yet. A high school senior’s admissions essays are being read by admissions officers who can tell. Every night splits time between both, and there’s time at the end for questions about your child’s situation specifically.

The format is short talks paired with table discussions. Bring your questions and an open mind.

For questions, contact Shelli Brudzinski.