Common School Notions to De-anthropomorphize AI. A High School Workshop Experience

Anthropomorphic representation of AI, emphasized by the ChatGPT media wave, was an obstacle set aside in a workshop on expert systems and machine learning applications. The experience involved the fifth-year classes of the Information Systems Articulation at the Technical-Economic High School "Jacopo Barozzi" in Modena. The students understood the statistical recombination work that GPTs do, but overall broadened their vision of what historically has been defined time to time as AI. Then, doing an exercise in Prolog followed by examples of machine learning paradigms, they focused on the differences between the two branches. It emerged a need of curricular applied mathematics, especially statistics. On the positive side, that workshop gave students a pragmatic and familiar attitude toward AI applications.