Tess Posner: AI, Creativity, and Education

In this conversation recorded on the 1,000th day since ChatGPT's launch, we explore education, creativity, and transformation with Tess Posner, founding CEO of AI4ALL. For nearly a decade—long before the current AI surge—Tess has led efforts to broaden access to AI education, starting from a 2016 summer camp at Stanford that demonstrated how exposure to hands-on AI projects could inspire high school students, particularly young women, to pursue careers in the field.

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What began as exposing students to "the magic" of AI possibilities has evolved into something more complex: helping young people navigate a moment of radical uncertainty while developing both technical capabilities and critical thinking about implications. As Tess observes, we're recording at a time when universities are simultaneously banning ChatGPT and embracing it, when the job market for graduates is sobering, and when the entire structure of work is being "reinvented from the ground up."

Key themes we explore:

• Living the Questions: How Tess's team adopted Rilke's concept of "living the questions" as their guiding principle for navigating unprecedented change—recognizing that answers won't come easily and that cultivating wisdom matters more than chasing certainty
• The Diverse Pain Point: Why students from varied backgrounds gravitate toward different AI applications—from predicting droughts for farm worker families to detecting Alzheimer's based on personal experience—and how this diversity of lived experience shapes what problems get attention
• Project-Based Learning as Anchor: How hands-on making and building creates the kind of applied learning that both reveals AI's possibilities and exposes its limitations, while fostering the critical thinking skills that pure consumption of AI outputs cannot develop
• The Educational Reckoning: Why this moment is forcing fundamental questions about the purpose of schooling—moving beyond detection tools and honor codes toward reimagining how learning happens when instant answers are always available
• The Worst Job Market in Decades: Sobering realities facing graduates alongside surprising opportunities—some companies doubling down on "AI native" early career talent while others fundamentally restructure work around managing AI agents rather than doing tasks directly
• Music and the Soul Question: Tess's personal wrestling with AI-generated music that can mimic human emotional expression so convincingly it gets stuck in your head—forcing questions about whether something deeper than output quality matters in art

The conversation reveals someone committed to equity and access while refusing easy optimism about technology's trajectory. Tess acknowledges that "nobody really knows" what the future of work looks like or how education should adapt, yet maintains that the response cannot be paralysis. Instead, AI4ALL's approach emphasizes building community, developing genuine technical skills, and threading ethical considerations through every project—equipping students not with certainty but with agency.

Her reflection on creativity proves particularly resonant. She describes discovering an AI-generated band with millions of streams, introducing friends to it in the car before revealing it wasn't real—noting their relief that "I'm glad you didn't really like that band because it wasn't that good." The anecdote captures something essential: our discomfort isn't just about technical capability but about authenticity, intention, and whether art requires a soul that has experienced darkness to help others through their own.

About Tess Posner: Tess Posner is founding CEO and board member of AI4ALL, a nonprofit working to increase diversity and inclusion in AI education, research, development, and policy. Since 2017, she has led the organization's expansion from a single summer program at Stanford to a nationwide initiative serving students from over 150 universities. A graduate of St. John's College with its Great Books curriculum, Tess is also an accomplished musician who brings both technical expertise and humanistic perspective to questions about AI's role in creativity and human flourishing.

Our Theme Music:

• Solid State (Reprise)
• Written & performed by Jonathan Coulton
• License: Perpetual, worldwide licence for podcast theme usage granted to Artificiality Institute by songwriter and publisher