I was very excited to take part in this week’s blog post, I chose to do the fish sorting activity on Code.org. As you go through the website you see that everything was designed in a fun, cartoon format, which made it both engaging and educational. As you get deeper into this activity the task became more challenging because the AI had to sort not just fish and garbage, but also different animals. I took several screenshots to capture my progress, these pictures will be included at the bottom of this post!

Like I said before, the task was quite simple at first, you would have a list of items and fish coming from the left side of the screen. As these things were showing up you needed to click on a button that said if it was a fish or not; the more you did the more the AI would learn to recognize and distinguish fish from the garbage. I may have gotten a little carried away and made 138 choices before moving on to the next part. While moving to the next part the AI was able to show you how well it can do when it comes to sorting the fish from the garbage, of course because of my many choices on the previous page the AI was perfect and had no mistakes. Once I moved on the AI had a new task, it needed to sort things based on whether or not they should be in the water; When hit with this task the AI did very poorly because it had never seen these new animals, it was only ever shown how to sort fish and garbage. After this was pretty much a rinse and repeat process of giving the AI more information in order for it to make proper choices.

This experience reinforced my interest in coding, which began from seeing hackers in movies doing amazing things on their computers. While real-life coding isn’t quite as dramatic, it is incredibly powerful and creative. When it comes to AI, they only know what we tell them to so by adding more insight the AI can get smarter and make better choices. After completing this task, I realized that teaching AI is not just about making computers do what you want; it’s about solving problems and thinking logically. AI has become an increasingly large part of our lives, apps that we use daily are now adding AI features to help you find things easier or to help you answer questions that you may have trouble finding answers to. Overall, I think having a good understanding of how AI works will become an important skill for us. Like I said earlier AI is becoming a bigger part of our lives everyday so by understanding how to effectively use it and understand it will help us progress as we move through the years of our lives.