Essay: When to use AI in the makerspace (and when to stop)

[Trevett Allen]

Hi all — after years running makerspaces, I finally wrote up how I decide when technology or AI actually serves a project and when it quietly kills the inquiry. It grew out of tensions many of us live with: encouraging kids to dream big while managing burnout, time, and the nagging question of "is this the takeaway I actually want them to leave with?"

The through-line I keep landing on is that the real math is attention, time, and capacity. There's a short five-line question matrix near the end that might be useful for your own project planning.

I'd genuinely welcome this group's pushback on it:

https://trevettallen.substack.com/p/when-to-use-ai-the-real-math-is-attention

— Trevett

[JD Pirtle]

Hi Trevett,

I think many of the questions in your matrix make sense, especially as helpful prompts for if/then AI decision making. I think it’s important to add some ethical, social, and safety questions before usage questions. The ones I think about a lot and discuss with my students are:

Development/Training: Where did the training data come from? Was it ethically sourced, or was it stolen/scraped from creators? We can't prevent introducing bias into the tools we make, but which ideologies are purposely built into these tools? This is especially important given the techno-authoritarian turn of many tech CEOs and VC folks and the growing number of tech companies scrambling to be the preeminent defense/policing tech providers.

Use: What are the environmental costs of using these tools? Not just power and water, but I’m thinking of things like the illegal coal-burning power plants Musk is using in Memphis and the environmental fallout for the communities surrounding them. What is the role of human operators behind the scenes? What are their working conditions while they clean data, and what are they exposed to in the process of flagging violent, racist, and disturbing content so the rest of us don’t see it?

Output: What impact will AI have on the increasingly post-truth nature of media, and what does that mean for journalism and democracy? How does the use of gen AI affect cognitive processes in students? How does interacting with AI chatbots endanger students, particularly as it is linked to increased rates of suicide and violence in users—especially children and adolescents?

JD

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[Trevett Allen]

Hey JD! I haven't seen you since CMK in... 2016? Eek!

I'm behind on my emails. Reply soon! Great to hear from you!