Civic Tech DC: AI Literacy Workshop - Understand the Why & How

NOTE: TO RSVP PLEASE USE LUMA
https://luma.com/a84c2u1o

​AI is everywhere.

Most workshops sell tools and dreams. This one teaches literacy.

​In a two-hour, hands-on workshop at MLK Memorial Library (Washington, DC), we build a usable mental model for how modern LLMs behave, where they break, and how to interact with them so results get better, safer, and less garbage. We’ll demystify what “AI search” is actually doing, then practice a simple loop to improve outputs without magic prompts.
​What we’ll do:

• ​Learn a plain-English model of how LLMs generate text and why confident errors happen.
• ​Explore different interaction loops with AI for different scenarios.
• ​Understand how to vet the outputs from an AI, telltale signs of hallucinations, and how to be confident in what you're delivering.
• ​Q&A: Answer specific questions you might have, explore different real-world example problems individuals will present, consult on approach.

​You’ll leave with a prompt patterns cheat sheet, an review checklist, and a one-week plan to try on a real task.
​Vendor-agnostic, but not vendor blind.
​Who it’s for: nonprofit staff, public servants, community technologists, and anyone who needs reliable results over novelty.
​Bring: (optional) laptop and a public example of data/prompts you're using.

This was drafted with the aid of ChatGPT 5-Thinking.