As generative AI rapidly enters everyday life, educational interventions for teaching about AI need to cater to how young people, in particular middle schoolers who are at a critical age for reasoning skills and identity formation, conceptualize and interact with AI. We conducted nine focus groups with 24 middle school students to elicit their interests, conceptions of, and approaches to a popular generative AI tool, ChatGPT. We highlight a) personally and culturally-relevant topics to this population, b) three distinct approaches in students’ open-ended interactions with ChatGPT: AI testing-oriented, AI socializing-oriented, and content exploring-oriented, and 3) an improved understanding of youths’ conceptions and misconceptions of generative AI. While misconceptions highlight gaps in understanding what generative AI is and how it works, most learners show interest in learning about what AI is and what it can do. We discuss the implications of these conceptions for designing AI literacy interventions in museums.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has witnessed unprecedented growth in text-to-image AI tools. Yet, much remains unknown about users’ prompt journey with such tools in the wild. In this paper, we posit that designing human-centered text-to-image AI tools requires a clear understanding of how individuals intuitively approach crafting prompts, and what challenges they may encounter. To address this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 existing users of a text-to-image AI tool. Our findings (1) offer insights into users’ prompt journey including structures and processes for writing, evaluating, and refining prompts in text-to-image AI tools and (2) indicate that users must overcome barriers to aligning AI to their intents, and mastering prompt crafting knowledge. From the findings, we discuss the prompt journey as an individual yet a social experience and highlight opportunities for aligning text-to-image AI tools and users’ intents.