Springfield, Massachusetts - Local tech 501(c)(3) springfield.community will be holding a free class for local youth aged 12-17 entitled AI Innovators: Creating Your Own Free And Secure AI Platform over the course of the next three Saturdays at Make-It Springfield, located downtown on Bridge Street. Made possible by a generous grant from Baystate Health’s Alliance for Digital Equity, this class will not only introduce students to the fundamentals of image and text generation using AI, but also teach them how to install and utilize free, open-source tools turning their own computers into unrestricted AI innovation platforms.
“Not only do commercial AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Twitter’s Grok impose a fee on users who wish to unlock these tools’ full functionality, but also require massive data centers which operate at great cost to the environment, both immediate and global, while simultaneously jeopardizing the health of nearby residents” emphasized Springfield.community’s President, Erica Rachel Andrews. “By teaching our students how to install fully functional AI tools on their own computers, instead of relying on massive infrastructure, we eliminate both the monetary and environmental cost of these promising young scholars’ continued innovation. Technology is always evolving: by putting the knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to forge a new path in the hands of the next generation, we’re helping create a future that serves the continued wellbeing of all of us, not just a select few.”
All students who complete the class will receive a free laptop donated by Alliance for Digital Equity pre-loaded with tools like Stable Diffusion and Ollama which handle all information processing locally on the users’ own devices instead of relying on datacenter infrastructure.
Visit https://springfield.community to learn more about springfield.community or make a donation. Visit https://makeitspringfield.org or https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-innovators-tickets-1644649122799 to sign up.