Girls'Day 2025: Team HeiCAD gives schoolgirls an insight into how AI works

On Girls' Day, 3 April 2025, schoolgirls in grades 8-10 were able to get to know HHU's mathematics, science and economics courses and get a taste of the training professions at the university. This also gave the girls an insight into professional fields that girls rarely consider in their career orientation.

Dr. Katarina Boland and Julijana Popovic from Team HeiCAD and Till Fahnenstich from the German Institute for Internet and Democracy (DIID) used theoretical questions and practical examples to show the girls what AI actually is and how it can be better assessed under the title "Where we already encounter artificial intelligence in everyday life and whether it really doesn't make mistakes". The workshop highlighted everyday examples of AI applications and provided a brief and varied insight into artificial intelligence.

The focus was on how artificial intelligence learns and the sources of error and bias - for example, in automatic image classification. Using a practical example, the students trained an AI model for face recognition themselves and discovered that the quality of the training data has a major influence on the result. The AI did not always recognise the faces correctly - an opportunity to analyse the causes and develop ideas for solutions.

Participants also discussed the social, legal and ethical challenges of this and other AI systems - and concluded with a look at generative AI such as ChatGPT. The topic of "hallucinations" was also raised, with an example explaining how these occur and why one should not rely entirely on generated information, even when sources are provided.

Finally, participants were able to ask their own questions about AI and share their own experiences. In particular, the use of ChatGPT for homework was discussed. As the girls attend different schools, there was an exciting discussion about the different ways the popular chatbot is used and the advantages and disadvantages of using it.