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BREAKTHROUGHS

Research Webzine of the KAIST College of Engineering since 2014

Fall 2023 Vol. 21

Design

Fostering Youth’s Critical Thinking Competency about AI through Exhibition

August 23, 2023 hit 354

An AI-related art exhibition “AI with Weird Wonderland” aims to foster youth’s critical thinking competency about AI through an informal learning experience, with collaborations from AI developers, designers, and artists.

Through four distinct exhibits that use virtual reality (VR), interactive videos, and sculptures, youth can immerse themselves in the current and future impacts of AI technology.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, today's youth are increasingly exposed to AI from an early age, encountering various AI-embedded devices and services. While AI offers entertainment and educational opportunities, it can also pose potential negative impacts and ethical dilemmas.

As a result, it is critical for the youth to develop AI literacy competencies that allow them to evaluate AI technology and use it effectively as a tool. Among various AI literacy competencies, critical thinking competency is crucial. This competency allows youth to critically assess AI, enabling effective communication and collaboration with AI-based systems.

Recognizing this, many schools are implementing curriculum aimed at teaching ethical issues related to AI. Although class-based formal education aims to effectively deliver consistent and structured content to several students simultaneously, there is a limit for these classes to develop critical thinking competency for individuals because each person may have different ways of thinking.

Figure 1. The four exhibits in the exhibition. (a) "Being Data to Feed AI" aims to prompt attendees to recognize that their faces and movements can be constantly detected and recorded without their knowledge. (b) "My AI's Life After I Died" encourages visitors to contemplate the unexpected impact of AI through various scenarios. (c) "AI Recommendation: Comfort or Losing Control?" highlights the reliance of AI users on useful suggestions from AI, and the potential loss of human decision-making ability. (d) "Walking with a Machine Unreadable Gait" invites attendees to envision a future where even ordinary human behaviors can be processed as data and become tools for surveillance.

To address these limitations, a research team led by Professor Sangsu Lee from the Department of Industrial Design at KAIST, designed an AI-related art exhibition titled "AI with Weird Wonderland". This exhibition aimed to foster critical thinking competencies about AI among youth through an informal learning experience. The team collaborated with AI developers, designers, and artists who created four unique works using technologies like facial recognition, virtual reality (VR), and interactive media to provide immersive, embodied interactions (Figure 1).

Figure 2. AI-related exhibition <AI with Weird Wonderland> poster and exhibition experience of the youth.

The exhibition was held in Seoul, and to explore the effects of the exhibition, young people were invited to experience the exhibition (Figure 2). This resulted in the exhibition helping youth connect their lives with AI through the critical thinking process. These findings suggest new educational opportunities for youth to become responsible AI users through the intersection of technology and art.

Figure 3. The research, titled "Fostering Youth's Critical Thinking Competency About AI through Exhibition," was presented at the 2023 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), held in Hamburg, Germany.

Sunok Lee, the first author, presented the research titled "Fostering Youth's Critical Thinking Competency About AI through Exhibition" at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2023 in Hamburg, Germany (Figure 3). This event is the top international conference in the field of human-computer interaction. Dasom Choi, Minha Lee, and Jonghak Choi also contributed as co-authors to the study. This research was supported by the 4th BK21 through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (MOE) ((NO.4120200913638).

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