Lakota Teens Train AI Models in Spearfish
SPEARFISH — Two years ago, Aiden Tunnissen imagined he would graduate high school and go directly into the work force. This year, he’s got bigger plans.
“Now, I’m going to college for coding,” Tunnissen said.
The 17-year-old has an idea for a video game that’s been brewing since he was a freshman in high school. The summer between his junior and senior year, he attended a camp that helped him realize he could become a programmer and bring his story, his game, to life.
The Lakota AI Code Camp (LAICC), was developed three years ago by a non-profit called Indigigenius.
The first year, they had nine students. Year two, 11 teens registered. This year, 15 Lakota students signed up for a primer on computer science and an introduction to coding and artificial intelligence (AI).
Mason Grimshaw, the lead instructor for LAICC and vice president of Indigigenius said the camp has grown gradually by word of mouth. That growth, he said, is important.
“I think a lot of our youth are saying no to things implicitly, because they never get to see the options. It’s just not even presented to them. That’s why the camp is here. It’s so that they can see it,” Grimshaw said.
This year’s LAICC students came to Black Hills State University for three weeks in June. Staying in dorms and eating at the student union, the camp offered an introduction to university life for teens learning to code, then to train an AI model. The model is specifically designed to identify and describe native plant life: using Lakota language and traditional knowledge.
The curriculum is developed by industry people, not educators, so its demanding.
“We ask them to do really hard things,” Grimshaw said. “These are real skills that people use at their day jobs. We ask a lot of them. They end all being able to do it. We ask them to do hard things, but we support them through that, and in getting them through that thing, you see their confidence grow.”
Despite the demanding curriculum, LAICC is designed to be accessible — in more ways than one. For one thing, the program removes economic barriers. LAICC is completely free for students.
“We give them their computers, which they get to keep if they finish. Everyone has finished so far,” Grimshaw said. “The laptops are Alienware gaming laptops, so they’re really like cream of the crop. You can do everything on them. It’s an important thing for the machine learning and the efficiency.”
Students are given phones to help collect data on walks through the Black Hills – capturing photos of plants that can be used to train the AI model. They’re also equipped with X-Box controllers, because instructors encourage gaming between lessons.
“It’s a nice introduction to technology. A big thing, since It’s all native kids, some from a lot less fortunate places than I am, they don’t have access to all of those kinds of tools,” Tunnissen said. “It didn’t even come across to me that I’d get a free lap top. I was just interested in coding, and now there’s a space for me.”
Camp organizers are also intentional about how they admit students. Enrollment isn’t restricted to students who display traditional markers of academic success.
“If you were doing things in more of a western way, you may assume that everyone needs a good GPA and reference letters. You need the cream of the crop. I would say our students are still the cream of the crop, they just may not have been as interested in high school or they had family things going on. That’s so common,” Grimshaw said. “The cool thing about it, is kids of all different kinds of interests, and backgrounds and academic achievement, they all can do it and they all do it.”
LAICC Program Manger Michelle Brown said, keeping GPA out of the equation has allowed the program to be interest driven, and made the camp uniquely impactful.
“I think for a lot of students, especially neurodiverse students, that’s the key. It’s not school, right? But it’s a way to hook their interest early on so that they have that hyper focus and then they’re completely in and invested. I think having it be interest driven, you’ll see the outcome when you’re working on this and everyone works on it together, you’re not in competition with the person next to you also helps the students who may be feeling left behind in more traditional school settings,” Brown said.
Students leave the camp with a lap top, and new suite of skills computer scientists use at their day jobs. They also leave having been exposed to opportunities in tech.
Every year LAICC hosts a speaker. The past two have been from Niantic (the company that developed the augmented reality game and 2016 smash hit Pokemon Go) and Pixar. This year’s speaker was from Salesforce.
“We get a lot of cool speakers. We’re trying to show, ‘Hey students, your image of what a programmer is is probably different than what it could be,’” Grimshaw said.
Tunnisson said more than just understanding what opportunities are available, LAICC shows students what opportunities are available to them specifically.
I would say, ‘Your idea of a Native America can go further.’ I thought for a while a lot of these kids are stuck thinking, ‘hey, we have to be like this, because this is what we know,’” Tunnisson say.
Brown said having Lakota instructors has been the key to that.
Grimshaw is from the Rosebud Indian Reservation. He said, early exposure to coding would have made a big difference for him growing up. That’s why Indigigenius launched LAICC in the first place.
“I hadn’t seen any code until college. I found that I really, really liked it actually. I just liked thinking in systems and the way that a computer scientist thinks, that’s how I think,” Grimshaw said. “I was thinking about, it would have been cooler to see this faster, and younger. In high school, maybe even elementary school or middle school or something. I just wanted, when I had that moment of ‘oh this is really cool,’ I’m sure that other native kids would have that same moment. The whole point is to get them to see it earlier than a lot of us did.”
The mission of Indigigenius is to promote and expand Native American representation in the tech industry, but there are important aspects of the camp that are formed to promote AI literacy in indigenous communities.
“AI and things like it are everywhere. They’re very powerful tools, but they’re being built by people who aren’t working in the best interest of indigenous or native communities,” Grimshaw said. “We wanted to build up literacy in our communities that would help us capture the good things about those tools and also protect us from the bad things.”
Grimshaw said, even if students don’t go on to study computer science or become programmers, that they’re able to share what they learn about how AI is developed in Silicon Valley in indigenous spaces.
LAICC, importantly, is an indigenous space. That serves two purposes. One, it helps students to connect with people who share the same cultural context.
Two, it allows for sharing language and traditions in a safe and welcoming space. That same sharing, contributes to the creation of a distinct and valuable artificial intelligence model.
“Overall, students have talked about how much they’ve connected with each other. How nice it was to be able to be in a Lakota space,” Brown said. “Some of the students who are reconnecting, it gave them a chance to learn in a setting without judgement. They could have people help them who live with (Lakota language) speakers, who could help them practice their pronunciation more, things like that.”
Students also explore the ethics of AI development, as it relates to indigenous data.
This year’s LAICC program participants grappled with a number of ethical questions. Should they include poisonous plants, like hemlock, in their application? What a plant misidentified a deadly plant as an innocuous copycat?
Students also explored the ethics of releasing ancestral knowledge to the broader public.
“With all of the Lakota stuff, we’re kind of on the fence about, should we be able to let all these people learn this too, or should this stay with us?” Tunnisson asked.
“Tobacco is a good example of something that kind of got away from us,” Grimshaw said.
He said it’s also important to think through what knowledge AI should have, especially when the new technology might not have the capacity to be a good steward of information.
The provenance of AI, in and of itself is a tricky topic. Large language models, like ChatGPT, were built using data that was assembled when OpenAI scraped the internet: gobbling up and digesting all kinds of written content: from tweets and blog posts, to news stories and reddit threads.
“Oftentimes OpenAI or Meta or whatever will think about data, it’s like tweets, reddit posts, facebook posts. If you’re working with indigenous data, it’s very often ‘We think this elder is saying something important so we’re going to record it.’ It’s like a completely different view,” Grimshaw said. “It’s not just a tweet that you fire off. It’s a meaningful story or something that captures a tremendous amount of historical knowledge, or cultural knowledge. As of yet, the systems aren’t appropriately taking that into account.”
Grimshaw said that’s why its important to have more Native American leaders working on developing the kinds of software that can re-shape our lives, that starts with giving students a seat in the classroom so that they can have a seat at the table in tech.
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