I ❤️ AI: Challenging Ageism: Building Inclusive AI & Communication

with technology, uh, self-taught forever. I came to the Institute a little more than a year and a half ago. Skye, I think, has been in the longest, by the way. Um, and the wonderful thing is there were so few members in the beginning, we all became very good friends, okay? And when I say friends, yes, you can be friends even though you're Zooming 99% of the time. But we would have an opportunity to get together with Noelle. I live in right outside of DC, and Noelle is a frequent flyer for events in DC, so I actually get to see her quite a lot. Again, my tech background, I am self-taught. I do not have a normal career. I was never a software engineer, thank God. But I did work for a lot of organizations that use pretty high-powered technology. And that is, I worked for, if you know the name, Today Show, you know, the television program. And I did a lot of editing. I was involved— do any of you know what the America's Cup is, the sailing race? That is the oldest event in the world in terms of a trophy. I was involved with that and I'd be all over the world and I would always hang out with the TV guys to see, um, satellite feeds were brand new, um, after the, after the, uh, Australians won. And so I was always curious, but then I started volunteering when I moved to Virginia 20 years ago, again, right outside of DC. I started helping neurodiverse individuals. And I don't know why, but I'm one of those people who could always communicate with older people. And even if they were neurodiverse, if you had dementia, I would always try to find a way to bring out conversation, memories, etc. And so when ChatGPT came along— well, of course, when Alexa came out, I was having individuals install those like a crazy woman. Why? Because voice command, I knew neurologically, was something really important. And it's important for all of us, right? You know, remember what your mother probably told you when you were little? Don't ever talk to people who are talking to themselves. Like, if you're somewhere— well, it turns out talking even to yourself is a good thing neurologically. So The deal is, is that I was a big evangelist for Alexa. And I was on a panel, the very first panel for Amazon for voice. It was their first voice summit. And I was on the panel convincing people why everybody of a certain age should have Alexa, meaning older population, for music alone. Because, you know, I don't know if you've seen the documentary about age, you know, music and how neurologically it's a good thing. And you can find people with the, the most extraordinary depths of Alzheimer's suddenly remembering the lyrics to a Beatles song or something from the 1940s or '50s. Because even though the neurons are affected, our brains have a way to find those file cabinets where that information is stored. So today, what I have focused on in the last several years is using the gift of AI, and most of the time ChatGPT. But me personally, I use them all. I mean, it's impossible not to test drive. In fact, Noelle makes us test drive a lot of the apps, which is a good thing. But I actually pay for quite a few, probably too many. To get their, you know, to get the feedback in terms of the emotion and so forth. And so I've developed, I'm almost done with a book called Recreational AI. And why that's been important is that I don't know if any of you ever took care of your, you know, loved ones, somebody in your family when they were old, but caregivers is a huge topic which I'm sure you understand, is a big job. And so with AI, I used— I started giving them tool sets of how to interact with the people that they took care of, as well as themselves. I mean, I went to a client's house and this woman grabbed me aside and she was Jamaican and she dragged me into the bathroom of her client. And she said, "I am going to kill him. I'm going to kill him," with that thick Jamaican accent. And I said, "It's okay, it's okay." So I immediately grabbed my phone and I go, "I'm about ready to kill an 87-year-old man. I'm really exhausted. I've had to change his diapers 3 times and da da da, and can you help me?" And immediately Chad came back. And I said, for 2 minutes, came back with the most extraordinary set of instructions, breathing. There were like 4 breathing change-ups and, um, talking about how she could go out and talk to the person again. And the change in her emotions was extraordinary. I mean, I loved it. And the other thing that helped is I knew she wasn't gonna go home and take it out on her relatives, right? Because how would you like to have that job and you're dealing with, you know, frankly, it's not a great job of taking care of somebody who you have to feed, do the hygiene, all that stuff all day long. And you're gonna go home to your family and you're not gonna be in the greatest mood. So that by using the suggestion of using AI as a companion piece to calm it down, I feel like I've given a lot of these caregivers a safety net. And in fact, I get yelled at because, you know, religious faith-based people always— every church seems to have a caregiver group in person. They all have the same stories, how many times their mother, you know, threw their food at them or had other— or wandered out of the house. And so I've kind of changed it up to take it away from sensationalism into results. And the other thing I was going to tell you that's wonderful, that again, from your experiences, is that for me, playtime, no matter what age you are, I don't care if you're 4 years old with AI or 90 years old with AI, playtime, meaning I love to make up fairy tales. I use fairytale that we know— Cinderella, Snow White, um, the Three Bears. Um, I, I just have so much fun, and I make them always one-act plays, very short. And it is wonderful to see the response of people taking on the characters. Um, and again, if they're neurodiverse, they're using their voice their reading, which is terribly important. And so that is one part that I wanted to introduce of the kind of work that I do. Um, it is so rewarding. Like today, I teach a class every Wednesday, or well, I had to do it today on Friday because I was tied up on Wednesday, but it's a facility that has 346 people and I've been teaching them AI. And it is such a turn-on. A woman today from Nigeria I taught her how to use DALL-E, because again, they're only using free apps, and DALL-E is a free drawing app. And it was fantastic. She was going crazy with all the African costuming. And then she would— she— I taught her how to prompt, how to do sensory things, like have the woman stirring, but you know, taking her breath in and everything. And she was squealing the whole time. It was just so much fun to see her getting so excited about the results. And then in the meantime, the other people who were in the class, I was just giving them basic prompting because, you know, most people have stopped at Google-style prompting, right? You know, I'm going, I wanna go on vacation. I wanna take, I want a flight that's on a Wednesday. Day after 4 PM, whatever. So when they're not used to the robustness of what these apps can create for them, and I absolutely love it. And one of the favorite thing is because this building is HUD, and what that means is they're 100% federally funding. There's two things that qualify you to be in the building: you're old and you're poor. Okay, so I will take people who have budgets of $25 a week. I know this is going to shock you, but Do— are you aware— well, you probably are aware that you can literally say where you live, you can say the kind of foods that you like, you say the budget, and ChatGPT, for example, will aggregate the products. Take beans. I make them— I always recommend eat a lot of beans because it's protein and it's usually— do you know they— that the apps will price control? And I will say the 3 supermarkets that are closest to them so that the current market value at those supermarkets can be delivered. Again, these are the kind of things with people who are aging, um, to make their lives simpler. My goal, by the way, is to every single person have their own app, uh, agent. What does that mean? You know, if you've been with Noelle Russell long enough, you know that you can bake an agent very easily now without coding that that can aggregate everything about a person's life. And if you have the URLs of the places there, whether it's their church, their supermarket, their schedule at the building, whatever, as long as you're aggregating the right information where they are responsible to update their information, it's a win. Um, and that's a very powerful thing because again, 90% of them only have smartphones. When I say smartphones, we can't deal with the people with flip phones yet. We're trying to get those replaced, but you can see it. But now I'd like to flip over, and I'm— and, and I will say one thing, if you ever want to ask again, I did not have a normal life. I did international business in terms of art market stuff. I even wrote a play that was done off-Broadway. I owned a restaurant at one time. Crazy. I did the Today Show, but I did marketing on an international national level for sports marketing, like the America's Cup for about 15 years. And I did the very first URL for a major sport, the America's Cup in 1994 with SAIC, who at that time owned WOZ. Remember when you wanted to start a URL, you would go to WOZ to get your name. And they were the sponsor. And so it was pretty incredible. We were the ones who, the first people who put an image on a URL for the World Wide Web. Okay, and although that seems like that's pretty boring, Sherri, but at the time that was really big stuff. That was really big stuff. So moving on, I found that when the ageism piece of this I wanted to represent, you know, I'm guilty, I've been using the wrong terminology forever. How many of you use the word— and I know you're probably 100%— elderly? Okay, we, we've communicated about people being elderly. We've probably used the words elderly with frail, you know. Um, if you don't— you know, most of our— if we— if you have children, most of them recreationally say, oh, you must be getting dementia if you don't respond to them fast enough. So, you know, it's, it's pretty hard. I mean, I, when I took the litmus test of the kind of vocabulary words that I used, it was pretty depressing. So I'm just going to throw some things out here and, and you can unmute yourself to answer some of these. So, you know, why do you think, what, what is the goal of reframing aging communication? Anybody want to jump in?

Can I ask a question? Just to—

Yeah, just what do you think the goal of reframing aging communications should be about? So what I would hope you would look for is making it positive, equitable, and focused more on thriving than decline. Right? Because, you know, our stories about aging always seem to be like, "And then their hips went, and then their knees went, and their shoulders went." And so, it's really important. How about stereotypes?

Do you—

can you give me some examples of stereotypes and prejudice and discrimination in ageism? How about technology? What do they say about older people and technology?

Do all to learn.

You got it. That is absolutely right. And again, all older people are frail. Um, and the other thing is about the prejudice. Let's be honest, people—

I'm—

I was guilty of it. No more, but I was guilty of it. The prejudice of feeling pity when you see somebody having to use a walker You know, the thoughts go through our head, oh geez, you know, that's one of the signs of wheelchair it next. And it's hard. And the discrimination part of it is, in terms of employment, let's face it, it is very hard to get a job, um, at a certain age because they're assuming that because older people are less tech savvy and they're just going to be less capable, and they might require more sick days than the normal person. So that's the discrimination. And according to 3 sources I had, it said ageism costs the U.S. health system about $63 billion a year. I was kind of surprised at that, by the way, but I'm— you know, not only health costs, but more than that in terms of the different challenges in terms of advancing. Although a lot of younger people are making a lot of money promoting ageism in terms of— you can't go on YouTube and TikTok not to see the number of people who are training you, who are pumping your muscles up, who are giving you all kinds of physical and mental Deepak Chopra, for example, is really raking it in with meditation for his older base. Well, he's older now too, so he's got a pretty strong older base. And then, so what kind of phrases do you think you should avoid, uh, you know, uh, in terms of terminology for age inclusion? One is senior moment. You know, I've used it, which is really insane that I've used that, but senior moment, the elderly, or refining to somebody still working at a certain age. Um, where are we, where are we? Oh, and retired and inactive. And what we would recommend is to use positive, neural, or empowering terms like, I know you're not going to believe this, but guess what? The one thing that should be consistent when talking about people of a certain age is to say older adults and active in the community, or actually say, you could say whatever you are, you can say older in their, in their 60s or 70s or whatever, not to be so focused on their actual age. So, um, the other thing that I love is prompts. What prompts will help you frame aging positively? And, uh, obviously, um, I believe is what strengths come with experience and how does your community benefit when all ages are included? Lastly, how can we help people of all ages thrive together? Now, I don't care what kind of— if you, for example, we talk about governance a lot. I think about governance within as a community thing. I'm very active. I've always been active. I've lived in 5 states in the United— in the US. I've also lived in Italy for a number of years. I lived in Australia. So I've loved places and I always look at how their government works and advocacy. And so for AI and older adults, these local— these governments, even the— even our federal government needs to put in the guardrails. And we use that word all the time. What does that mean? It just means you get a fixed criteria In terms of, I love Noelle Russell Russell back in the beginning, she always used this pizza shop that she, that she goes to. And so we would make fun of like, it could do your nails, you know, you would have to put in enough cart rails. So, you know, the pizza shop wasn't going to change your tire or again, do your nails and things like that. And the same thing for the language of aging. To avoid that. In terms of governance, I would want every single community, no matter what level—local, state, or federal—to have people who are smart enough. And that's the same thing in terms of, you know, cultural discrimination, color, gender discrimination. That should all be there. It could all be baked in together. And if you have those kind of jobs, it's important to represent that all the time. Now, there are a lot of companies who actually target get older adults, um, to sell them things. You could go— you could even go on to, um, Amazon, and you will be shocked at some of the searches that if they know you are older and you're looking for something, I will tell you, they skew towards products of a certain age. And guess what? The algorithms come up with testimonials from the 5 stars down to the 1 star with people who are closer to how they're identifying you, the customer, that you're gonna believe somebody who's closer to perhaps your own age versus the 20-year-old who's trashing on the product for whatever reason. So I would like to now switch over to the slides and get your feedback on that. And again, AI, you know, I don't know if any of you use Gamma, I use Gamma frequently. My favorite thing at the place where I'm teaching right now, there are several Ethiopians and a man showed up for the first time and they're very multicultural in this building, which I love. And I showed him how to use Gamma and his prompt was he wanted to know what Ethiopia would look like by 2040 in terms of product use, technology. It made 10 slides that he couldn't believe it. I gave the link. He only had brought his phone, by the way, as his tool. He sent it to his children and he said he had made it and they couldn't believe it. They're like, how did you do that? It's impossible. How did you do that? So when I put that thing about flipping the switch, here's how I feel. A lot of people, once they get into adult communities, and it may be, you know, there, there's so many versions of adult communities now, right? Whether you need support, assisted living, or if you just like to hang out because you don't want to have a bunch of 5-year-olds riding their bikes on your street, whatever, whatever motivates people to live in these communities. Um, the thing is, is that They have people who are pretty smart, who they have the money to do pretty robust presentations in terms of experienced individuals. That happens at the facility I am. People talk at them. So the flipping the switch means I love the fact that so many of these individuals, like T.S. from Ethiopia, is going to be able to present this slideshow. He will present it. Sure, I'll do it off my computer with an HDMI cable. They have a 90-inch TV that I got Georgetown students to donate to them so we could do larger presentations in the dining area because that's the most seating area. But it's just so— it's just, it's really exciting. And we're going to go to an Ethiopian bakery because Apparently it's hard to get people to show up to things unless you give them a snack. That seems to be one of the binding things there. So again, there's so many different formats. We're starting a poetry club. We're starting a memoir club because I showed one woman today, I said, give me 10 things about your life. I don't care what order. What did you like when you're 5 years old? What'd you do as a teenager? Blah, blah, blah. We just stacked them in. And then I just asked Chat, uh, chronologically reorder this and make it a memoir. And what it came up with was very exciting. And she's 88 years old. Well, my God, it's like I gave her an injection of something. She would just— she came alive like you would not believe. Because, you know, most people talk about, yeah, one day I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna write my story. So the beauty is that now they're believers that they could actually do— write their story. So that's fun. So let me go to the slideshow here, uh, make sure I can open this. There we go. Can you see it? Yes. Can you see it? Yes, we can. Great. Okay, my only problem is, is again, let me get rid of Sorry about this, I'm trying to get rid of the, uh, captions. Where are you, captions? Why are you doing this to me? Sorry, sorry, sorry. Usually it's right on my bar. By the way, one of the things I did— and don't laugh at me because I know this sounds like a cliché I was pulled into a garden club when I moved to Virginia. I was having a pity party. I'd lived in Westport, Connecticut, which is a fabulous place to live. I'd always been around water. So here I come into this place, Virginia, where most people were federal employees, blah blah blah. And one day there are three women— picture like Hamlet, the wick, or the the three witches from Shakespeare, instead of a cauldron, they were mulching. And I said, "Oh, it's one of those marches where it was like 35 degrees. Oh, you should go inside. I'm sure they'll give you free coffee or soup." And they go, "They've never given us anything." And I realized that the garden that they were working on was going to probably be beautification for the Whole Foods. It was pre-Whole Foods another typical, like Whole Foods before that. So I march in and I kind of told you that I did major events where I used to pull millions of dollars out of large, pretty well-known corporations. And I went to the manager. I said, there are 3 really older women out there and they were very cold. And they said, you've never done anything. I go out and one of them grabs me by the arm and said, I don't care where you live. You're joining this garden club. And back then I was still in my early 50s and I was still afraid of older women. So I go, uh, okay, I'll come to it. You know, so I got conned into it. And then I was the president of 60 garden clubs or whatever. Guess what I ended up doing? I was the first virtual resource person. And I'm going to tell you, yes, garden club ladies are usually over 50. And I'm being polite on that. I taught them to Zoom. I taught them to screen share. I taught them how to do so many cool presentations. This was all before ChatGPT. And then in the last 3 years, I taught them how to use ChatGPT and also GammaUp to do presentations. And so, believe it or not, I am an evangelist for giving those skill sets because the one thing is, is that AI democratizes aging. There is no reason why the tools of what you younger, younger individuals like, Skye, there's no reason why I can't have the power of learning what you know. I— it's just that obviously the applications of how is used— I'm not going to be selling a $5 million company on how they should add to their SAAS, uh, whatever. Not, not interested. Um, but so it's very different. So let's go. So here we go for Challenging Ageism. Let me move this for a second. I see you guys. All right, so again, you can see the definition of ageism based on age and targeting, and I covered some of these. It's hard. I mean, you know, because I hang out with people, I can see how this does impact them. And I have some genius friends who are in their 70s who are just tech geniuses, were involved with so many software breakthroughs in the long history of employment and worked for amazing companies. And, you know, they're having fun with AI, but they feel that there's no hope for them to actually get employed back at Oracle or IBM where some of them used to work. So So, you know, here's a— we talked about these, the stereotypes. So again, the prompting, the kind of language, very important. And again, I'm guilty of all of this, and I am one. I am older. I am an older person. And so You know, I, I really do understand the dilemma of, of rethinking and getting it right. So I love this term. I never heard of it before, but heterogeneity. Who knew this? So the ways to look at people and how you describe them or engage. Which I thought was kind of cool in terms of the correct language. So look, recognizing this broad spectrum of individual differences, very critical. So anybody, don't hesitate to ask anything as we, as I go through these. I love this. You know, there are so many people who are making so much money on social media, on TikTok. I mean, I don't know if any of you saw a recent news report on a piece, and I always love it because when I worked at the Day Show, we did all these little vignettes. So I really get excited when I see a good thing about seniors making a fortune on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram and Um, you know, some of it's silly, you know, some of them are like 80-year-old brothers dancing and doing silly acts and stuff like that, but they have over a million, um, people looking in on them, and, and they're laughing all the way to the bank. So, uh, I do, I do like late career stories. I think that they're positive because although you're not there yet yourselves, you will be someday. And so I look at myself— people really don't know how old I am, which is— I, I like that part. Um, but what I really enjoy about it is that people are like, well, why are you— why are you so busy? Why are you doing this? And I love the fact that I am implementing school tools for these individuals who might have an amazing story to share after they learn how to use those tools too. I don't know. I did help one person do a TikTok, but she wouldn't listen to me because she kept changing hats in her one minute and I couldn't break her of that habit because it was very, it was pretty crazy. But, um, I haven't checked in with her for a while, but I have actually given a few people some ideas for TikTok, and they have— they do have a following. I don't know, I don't think they're making a lot of money, but they might be making maybe $30 a month. Okay, so pretty silly, but there you go. All right, and again, prompting to prevent ageism. So I, you know, I am guilty of this too. And number 2, the reflect the heterogeneity is generate an image of a senior citizen. I have I have done that. I am guilty. I have done that. So confidently using a smartphone or whatever. You can see, write about older adults reflecting their diverse experiences and capabilities and challenging stereotypes, you know, about diversity. And intergenerational. Come on, we have Younger relatives, either children. I mean, I have a 34-year-old. I actually know, do you know, I know more AI than my son, and that's a whole other subject. But the only thing I did for him is I taught him how to use ChatGPT and he got a better job. That's the only thing he did with AI. So the business case for age-inclusive AI. Um, look at this marketplace. I mean, this is huge. $2.1 billion. All of you are just getting older, right? And so the market is huge. Uh, it's huge right now because boomers own multiple homes, in some cases multiple homes. Um, they might have 2 vehicles. They are able to travel. Um, now obviously not all boomers, but you know, there's a significant amount of comfort right now, um, in the boomer population. So look at these statistics, the 2.1 billion by 2050. That's huge, and it's the fastest growing segment. So the implementation Some of this is just common sense, right? How do you knock out age bias? And obviously implement comprehensive age-inclusive style guides. And believe it or not, like AARP, National Council of Aging, all their websites, you can find— which I never knew existed— style guides. And the style guides are the recommended language, uh, that one should be using when you're describing things for older adults. So any questions? Oh, and I like the metrics to monitor for bias reduction, um, click feedback. Now ironically, there are businesses who want to highlight They want to highlight aging to show that they are frail or whatever because they have a good or service that they're telling— they're, they're trying to pitch you that if mom's falling apart, well, they'll be there to give them physical therapy or things like that. So, um, if that's your business goal, uh I don't know what to say to you, but I guess I do understand because you have to figure out how you're going to rope in people. But if it could be avoided, it would be great. So I kind of like this, the key performance, you know, KPI indicators. You can do language. Look at all the— I mean, this is things we have learned in the institute through Noelle Russell Russell Russell. Language audit stores diversity metrics. Um, feedback across age groups, it's really fun. I don't know how many apps you guys use, but I, you know, take Claude, Perplexity, Chat, um, what am I missing that I usually do? Anyhow, that's enough. But it is amazing when you take on a role and make yourself a different age. Like, I love to pretend I'm a millennial, and then I talk about older adults, and I asked them about talking to my advanced age parent to see what they recommend. And it's really— I know it may sound like a crazy exercise to you, but you should try it because you may be shocked. If you're a parent right now, um, and if you happen to have your own millennial at home, you will see what these different apps are recommending. It might surprise you. And again, bias detection and design adoption rates, all, you know, things we know are terribly important. So, you know, how many of us have thought about age limiting their abilities? Yeah, I'm not going to, I'm not going to be climbing Everest now. That's, that was never on my list, but it's totally off my list. Okay. I might still be up for seeing if I can downhill ski on a black diamond course. I used to be a skier. Um, are there any things which you've given up for a while that you would try again, by the way? Is there anything, a sport or something, that you think you've aged out of that you'd have the guts to go back to? Everybody cross country, cross country, cross country skiing, skiing. Yeah, I, I used to love that. I haven't tried that for a while, but you've put that in my head. Maybe we don't get that much snow here anymore, by the way, so that is one of the problems. So, um, oh, and the other thing is, you know, when I lived in Italy Everybody wanted to practice English with me. So that I failed to learn Italian because I was a communication director of a very large enterprise with the America's Cup. And they'd be chatty, chatty. Is this the right word? Whatever. And I'm like, oh, well, how do you say that in Italian? No, it's okay. We tell you later. So I got nowhere. So yes, going back and trying to pick up a language again is one of the— but, you know, with AI, we can cheat. And cheat's not the right word. We now have the skill set to be able to communicate easier, especially if we get— I don't know if any of you are going to put your money down on the new Apple AirPods where you can instantly hold your phone and it will translate for them. And when they talk back to you, it translates right to your pod. So that's pretty incredible. So action plan, action plan, things you can do when you're doing— again, I'm, I'm going to say this in the governance realm about looking at your prompts, um, your language, the KPIs from the slide. And if, uh, you know, create your own style guides, which might be kind of cool with your own family, even if you're not that old. You can create guardrails with your own family in terms of language. How's that one sound? And I love this: actively seek perspectives from diverse age groups when making decisions or designing solutions. This should not only be one way ever. So I'm gonna stop sharing. Does anybody have any questions about anything? I—

yeah, sure I do. Thanks so much. This is a lot of fun. This is Eve Kadar.

Oh, how are you? I'm doing all right, thanks.

So what I'm finding, I mean, I love all these ideas, and I hope you're going to share the slides because—

Totally, totally.

There's a lot of anxiety about technology in general. They're very, I mean, the elders that I've been interacting with, including my mother who's 95. 95? 95 and kicking it. She's independent, but she's—

I love it.

I would say frustrating for me to deal with on the technology level. There's a lot of anxiety that, um, that this isn't good for, for humanity in general. We shouldn't be doing this stuff. You mean that's what you get as feedback with them? Yes, yes, yes. I can't even get her to, uh, like Alexa, you know. I, I've purchased more than one, one item for her on these, uh, you know, and it's not— so I was wondering how you deal with that pushback? That's so asking.

I am, I am the baby of 5 children, so that already positions me as the ham, as the, you know, the terminology we say in English, the ham in the family. So I would constantly have to come up with humor to engage with my older siblings. So when I got into this space of, of helping older individuals with technology, especially 10 years ago, you know, it's really funny, I was at the very same I told you I was at the very first voice conference that Amazon held, and Noelle Russell was there. Never met her, but, and I should have put the— I should have pressed harder to get Amazon to hire me, but at that time I was engaging on another level for other work I had to do. But so I always get it when I find out what music they enjoyed. I discovered a woman who has macular degeneration in the building. She didn't want to tell anybody she's actually blind, okay? She is bona fide blind. But when I put an Alexa in her apartment and she realized— she sang opera in New York, she did a Metropolitan performance like 4 times in the chorus, okay? She auditioned and got on, but she would always be hired for weddings and big events. And so when she realized voice commanding operas by— and then she would ask for really crazy stuff that might have been harder. You would think, "Oh, I bet you it doesn't have that in its Play Deck," right? In Spotify or whatever, the free version of Alexa. It did. And I don't know anybody who— I have yet to meet somebody who does not like music, okay? And in fact, the very first person I had using an Alexa, when we started to do Frank Sinatra, she belted out My Way. Complete Alzheimer's, she belted out My Way, and she looked at me and she goes, She goes, "I bet you I gave you a little surprise." And I was like, "Oh yes, you did." And that joy, I can only tell you, you've gotta make them laugh. Even if you do knock-knock jokes, okay? If you have Alexa and you go like, "Tell me a knock-knock joke," and they're so bad, they're so bad, but they're so bad that they're funny, okay? And a lot of people who are older have grandchildren. There are 6 people, because we only gave out 20, uh, Alexas to start with as a beta test. There's 6 people have grandchildren, and I admit we can hear all their asks, by the way. And we know when the grandchildren are visiting because they ask crazy questions, and you just know they're having fun. And again, there's nothing wrong with factoring in fun. And if somebody's depressed or lonely, they can— you know, most people who have caregivers, what do they do? They have a recliner. Okay, let's go sit Grandma or Grandpa in the recliner, or your client, and they're in front of a TV all day long. I had a woman who had had, um, oh, what was her condition? She— well, she had Parkinson's disease, the second thing, but she had something before that. She was confined to a wheelchair, and she had this routine with her caregiver who was with her 50 hours a week. They had all their shows, and that's what they did every day. They'd do the snack break, the lunch break, all of that. Well, when I showed the caregiver, who was from Sierra Leone, on her phone and we started playing trivia, the woman called me up. She was wonderful. I think she was only like 78 And she goes, "Damn you, Sherry." And I go, "Karen, what's wrong?" And she goes, "You've ruined it. I don't watch my programs all day. She's asking me all these questions to make sure my brain is functioning." I loved it. Okay, how can you not love that? And then I had a— and then I was a present. You'll love this. A 90th birthday present for a mother of a woman I met through a tech conference. And she wanted to have her mother learn how to use an app. Basically, we thought ChatGPT because at that time it had the best free parameters. It turns out she had had a self-published book 25 years ago, and it turns out she still had the Word file on the book. So I showed her how she could cut and paste it into ChatGPT to edit it because it was about spirit fairies. Okay, don't laugh, but this is the kind of stuff I they do, a spirit fairies. And apparently her fairies had given her updated information that she wanted to edit in. And my gosh, it was just incredible. Um, her daughter wanted to murder me, of course, because her mother then asked for her 91st birthday, because the whole year plus has gone by, is for her daughters to pay to, uh, for the self-published book. So, uh, yeah, and I have so— I, I have so many stories. I have a woman who was born with an umbilical cord around her neck, and so she was sent away to a private school for disabled children. She, she worked for the EPA for 38 years doing very menial stuff, but she's at this facility, and guess She started swimming and winning all the medals that seniors, Senior Olympics and things, can win. I showed her how to prompt, and I never thought in a thousand years that she would ever, ever be able to do this. She called me at 8 o'clock at night following the session that I did it. She read me the story, and then we illustrated. It almost made me cry. It was so amazing because she had a great niece and nephew, and it kind kind of was like Hansel and Gretel, by the way, but it incorporated her relatives. And she had promised them to send a news story at least once or twice a month. So think of the incredible joy to connect in that way, to empower yourself in that way, to give this gift. And I'm sure they those little kids probably think, oh, there's crazy Aunt Carol. But crazy Aunt Carol proved that she was capable of creating stories just for them, and pretty, pretty cool illustrations too. I love, I love the illustrations. So, and in fact, we sent it to the Washington Post, who are going to do a story about what I'm doing. It'll probably come out during the holidays because they said it's like a holiday story, you know, feel-good. But that's okay. That's perfectly fine. So, again, the tools— a lot of the things I'm telling you are advanced stage. If you dial it back and you're in positions where you sold a contract to a company that does a lot of work in governance, again, there's the governance, you need to be aware of the language and you need to change it for yourself. Look, I told you I was guilty of it, and now I have to watch how I represent it as well. And in fact, the group who showed up today, and I said, what are the things which bother you the most? And they said, when the people who cut their grass at their facility, somebody asked one of them some information about the building, go, oh, just ask any of those really old people that are sitting on the bench.. And that was interesting that one of the women had picked up on that. And she goes, you know, I never thought about it. I looked at where I live as an apartment building, you know, an independent apartment building. But when they said that, it kind of hit home. So are there any— oh, we have questions. Where are we? Where are we? Yes, I do.

This is the dream. Sorry, go ahead. Yes, yeah, thank you for the presentation because you can feel the passion. So my question is, what aging populations show lower engagement with AI and what social, educational, or technological barrier explain this gap? So according to you.

Lower engagement? Okay, so I told you, I told you, I work with, I work with a variety of older individuals and I do deal with people with dementia and Alzheimer's. So that is lower engagement in terms of teaching them how to prompt independently is kind of a lost cause. But I'm telling you, when you're doing a session with them, you will be amazed how much you can pull out of them in terms of sensory things, color, a variety of things which are all there and your other things. And again, I mean, I have people all the time with dementia. I get them to prompt, you know, I'll say, what color, what color dress can Cinderella wear? And I said, we're so tired of her looking like the rag queen. And they'll come out with incredible— they'll come out with actually interesting comments. In fact, one woman said, "Why does she have to wear a dress? Women don't wear dresses. I want her to be in pants." And I went, "Okay, our Cinderella's in pants." So, and she, yeah, she really unfortunately would go, as we say, off the property if she— if we didn't keep tabs on her. What was the other one? Did I answer it in terms of the low level, it means you're going to have to work with them. You're going to have to co-prompt, co-prompt with them. But it's very doable and it's fun. You will find yourself having fun if you bake that into the process. Like, you know, my favorite— I think I told this at the beginning— my favorite twist is to have the mean sister for Cinderella, who's named Drusilla, by the way, to get the prince. She always wins the prince and Cinderella doesn't win the prince.

That's one of my favorites. Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay.

Thank you, Sherry. But just see your imagination. Think about it. Your imagination is the secret trigger of the prompt. Okay. It's your job to pull that out of them.

Mm. Okay. Thank you, Sherry. Thank you. You're welcome.

You're welcome. Anybody else?

Yeah. Hi, this is Krishna. I have a question too. Okay, great. I'll keep it simple. I think I took away that probably the very first thing we want to focus on is language. Okay. That's my takeaway so far anyway. Language shapes AI training data and societal bias, and then there's impacts from there. So I was curious if that's true, then how do AI teams measure ensure long-term fairness considering that societal definitions of bias can evolve over time?

I don't know if you—

Yeah, that's a great question. But, you know, these things are not all standalones. If you're in governance or if you're in a company and you have these guardrails, even before AI, there have always been guardrails, let's be honest. So what you just do is that you make sure when you're using prompting, that all of that is mentioned. So again, the earliest example was, as we said, Noelle Russell Russell used to do the pizza shop and make sure that it wasn't— that it didn't— you wouldn't ask and it wouldn't come back, "Oh, well, we can do your nails between these hours," or whatever. So the same kind of language is important. And again, it's not just age, it's the entire package of guardrails you put in to avoid bias. Okay, and there's a standard thing, you know, you can do a prompt that you put into everything you're writing that you are looking for the output to represent. Uh, again, could be corporate or it could be community governance. I mean, I don't know specifically. I think it holds up for everything. I mean, are any of you baking in prompts every single time of cutting and pasting to guarantee that that's never an issue? I know I do because I live in a little town called Vienna and I've been on their case forever. And every time I look at their website, I go back to their website and I just bake in all the things in terms of the prompts. I'm saying, this is what you need to know because some of the stuff was discriminatory and they didn't even realize it because they just aren't tuned into it. You know, when you, when you take some of the language on smaller towns, except, well, you could take even a larger city, and you put the URL in and you say, prompt it and say, let me know if diversity has been misrepresented on this website. And I'm going to tell you, it fast— it finds it faster than the speeding bullet. And you can define what you want it to find, right? Have you ever tried that? Try it, try it. Do a URL of some town or where you live and ask that question. Um, are there, are there words and language that is not addressing proper diversity, etc.? And see what happens. I know I sent it to the mayor, who is a friend, and I go, look at all this stuff on your website And she was shocked. And she goes, okay, we're going to have to have that conversation about AI, aren't we? And I go, yes, we are. So are there any more questions? Because we're almost up at the hour and I don't want to leave anything out. Anybody else? Again, you know, I've given examples. I think I don't care what age you are. Recreational AI was one of the things I mentioned. There, you know, when I was growing up, it was board games. We played Monopoly, oh my God, for forever. It seems like my entire childhood, uh, that's the number one game that we would play. But now, I, you know, I, I play verbal games, I play trivia games, um, with the individuals I hang out with. And I always make this comment when I'm in the community I feel that I've returned to the way I used— my rhythm of my neural response rate is around 35 years of age. I'm going to tell you that because I was— I was wheels on fire, okay, when I was that age. I gave you a little clue of the stuff I was doing at a younger age. I just feel that I've gone back there because of the amount of engagement with AI, exploring constantly. And when I'm working with these older individuals, I think delight is the secret sauce. That dopamine and those endorphins, my God, it is great. And that's what you get. That's what you get when you do this right. So, um, is there anything else? Are we good? Again, thank you. I can't wait to share this because I know we had about 25 people who said they couldn't come to this, but hopefully This won't look too bad as recording. Cheryl, Cheryl Lynn. Cheryl Lynn's our favorite person from the community. She is the motor behind all of this. And thanks to Skye for getting this cooking. Skye, are you still here? Did we lose Skye?

No, I am still here and I appreciate this session.

Skye's got a little guy who we occasionally get to see who I've fallen in love with, so we're One of the days, Sky, we're going to do a Zoom with your little guy so I can meet him properly. We're going to have to.

He's had me up for the last 24+ hours off of 3 hours of sleep because he developed an ear infection. So I am working off of fumes now because we've been in the children's hospital.

Oh, sorry. Oh, gosh, I'm so sorry. Yeah, you didn't need that. Well, again, I look forward to— anytime you want to readdress it. There's just, you know, again, the recreational AI we're going to talk about a whole lot more in the community because it's that kind of escape where you can get a little brain pause from Noelle Russell Russell, where we have to learn all this stuff and your brain feels like it's exploding. A little recreational AI is kind of like having a little pause, a little break. So thank you all and have a great weekend.

Thank you, Sherry. Bye-bye. Thank you.