The Somesville Library will host author and podcaster Jeff Pennington for a free AI Literacy workshop on Wednesday August 26 at 5:30 p.m. The event is open to the public, and no prior experience with AI is required.

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Pennington is the author of You Teach the Machines: AI On Your Terms (2025), a plainspoken guide for people who want to understand artificial intelligence — whether they embrace it, question it, or choose to opt out. Written for readers who don’t have a technical background, the book has reached audiences in print, ebook, and audio, and has led to a podcast of the same name that Pennington co-hosts with his daughter.

 

The workshop came before the book. Pennington has led these sessions for more than 850 people from California to Maine, with participants ranging in age from 12 to well past 80. He has found that curiosity about AI usually arrives paired with unease. “Nine out of ten people I meet are afraid of AI,” he says. His workshops are built to replace that fear with understanding: what these tools actually are, what they can and can’t do, and how ordinary people can decide for themselves what role — if any — I should play in their lives.

 

Drawing on more than 25 years in data science and artificial intelligence, Pennington uses real examples from finance, cooking, health, music, driving, and everyday life to show how you and your data are used to teach today's AI, and what you can do to protect yourself. The session is open to all comers, from the AI-curious to the AI-skeptical. No registration is required.

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You Teach the Machines: AI On Your Terms is carried locally at all Sherman’s stores and at Hidden Barn Books in Bar Harbor. The book is also available to borrow at area libraries.

The intro to the book can be heard free at youteachthemachines.com/audiobook-introduction.​

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About Jeff Pennington: Jeff Pennington has worked for more than twenty-five years in data, data

science, and artificial intelligence, and has authored or co-authored more than twenty peer-reviewed papers in biomedical informatics, data privacy, and health AI. He began his career developing web search analytics at Ask Jeeves, one of the first major commercial natural-language search engines, and most recently served as Chief Research Informatics Officer for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute. He is the author of You Teach the Machines: AI On Your Terms, and co-hosts the You Teach the Machines podcast with his daughter. Find him online at youteachthemachines.com.

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