5 AI Skills High Schoolers Should Develop

For a lot of us educators, we grew up perceiving artificial intelligence as less science, and more science fiction. Before my current work leading our academic support team at Veritas AI, an AI program for advanced high schoolers, I came to AI a little over seven years ago through research I conducted at the University of Cambridge. Working with a senior astrophysics researcher, I coded simple AI models, and even just those seven short years ago, the larger world of AI felt so disconnected from the specific work I was doing. And that's how many AI scientists felt for a long time!

ChatGPT, and the popularization of GPT-3/4 in the past 5 years, has changed everything. I think this boom in generative AI has done two key things for the AI world: (1) it has made it clear how much promise AI has not just for analysis but for creation or “generation,” and (2) it has also made it clear how accessible AI can be. Low-code to no-code AI, or AI that requires very little coding, allows everyone, including our youth and our students, to access AI!

With all this information in hand and with the world of AI at our student's fingertips, this article aims to highlight the AI skills that all students should start building NOW as they look to level up their own academic and professional skill building. Take it from me, the academic director of a high school AI program where I see students day in and day out leverage AI to drive innovation (including projects that blow my undergraduate work under the water!)

1. Learning what AI Chatbots and other generative models are out there (in other words, there's more than just ChatGPT!)

Chatbots like ChatGPT are phenomenal for allowing students to use simple language prompts, similar to how they would use Google (which also uses AI!), to make searches and brainstorm for content generation.

Language generation does not even start and end with ChatGPT, and you can find specialized Chatbots dedicated to particular areas and applications of language generation. For example, if students are for video generation, they can use softwares like Sora and VideoLeap.

2. Using smart prompt engineering to leverage AI Chatbots like ChatGPT effectively

What good is knowing that Chatbots exist if your student doesn't know how to really harness their power? This is where prompt engineering comes in!

Prompt engineering is a term that came into public consciousness recently, and it means exactly what it is titled: by configuring or smartly “engineering" the prompt someone is giving a Chatbot, they can better drive the results they are looking for! Chatbots can and often do make mistakes, and we can use prompt engineering to fact-check our Chatbots and drive (more) correct outputs.

3. Learning to leverage AI alongside other technology you've already mastered

When a lot of us think of AI and our mind jumps to ChatGPT, we are doing so because we think of AI as separate or specialized software. That is, we often think that AI tools are ONLY AI tools, and that they exist separately from other technology.

The reality is that most of the popular low-code tools many of us know, like Google Sheets and Excel, have recently been innovated so that students can use tools like ChatGPT with them! This lesson is also one that every student at Veritas AI relates to! Most students come to Veritas with background knowledge in coding or software applications, but no experience with AI. With a basic technical background, any student can extend their coding and software application skills towards building an AI skillset.

4. Learning to leverage AI to automate your scheduling and daily tasks (alternatively titled: embracing the non-violent Terminator in you!)

AI is more than just content generation and data analysis, and there exist so many AI tools to help students get daily tasks done. AI is all about automating human reasoning and thinking, after all! Even something like organizing a busy academic extracurricular schedule is something students can do more easily with AI. Motion is an AI tool that enables students to manage their different projects and activities with automated AI scheduling.

5. Leveraging AI ethically (yeah, yeah, I know all of us educators hear this all the time, but it is so very important!)

On its face, using AI ethically might not sound like a skill, but it really is. Many students have made the mistake of thinking that they can use ChatGPT to write an academic assignment or their college admissions essay, and have been shocked to learn that doing so is in every sense plagiarism.

Learning the ethical boundaries of how to operate and use AI are essential to set students up for success. AI is certainly the future, but we all have a responsibility to ensure we're committing to a future that's ethical for us and the students of future generations. That means that when we use AI, we need to do it with our ethics firm and our values in hand... or more accurately, in our fingertips as we engineer our next prompt!