By Jesse Levine and Ed Ludlow
Bear Grylls, the adventurer, TV host and author, is joining forces with artificial intelligence company Seekr to launch a new platform where kids can learn what he says is the next big survival skill — digital literacy.
The site, called Mission Seekr, will allow young explorers to participate in online humanitarian and environmental “missions” while gaining digital media literacy skills. Seekr’s technology evaluates content for reliability and reveals political leanings, to help users make informed decisions about what they read or view online.
“It’s a tsunami of information, not only coming at young people, but also then being generated and put out,” Grylls said in an interview on Bloomberg Television Wednesday.
Grylls is currently the host of Running Wild with Bear Grylls, where he takes celebrities — including former US President Barack Obama — into the wilderness to “push their bodies and minds to the limit to successfully complete the adventure of a lifetime,” according to the show’s website.
The centerpiece of Seekr’s technology is its search engine, which uses natural language processing and core semantic analysis to assign news articles a reliability score. Grylls lauded Seekr for taking positive action in AI, noting how parameters and guardrails seem to be an afterthought to the rapidly evolving technology itself.
Grylls isn’t a “digital dinosaur,” he said, as he has been using Seekr’s generative AI-powered search since before his commercial relationship with the startup began.
“I think young people need to be empowered with modern-day survival skills that will be relevant for their life and empowering for their life,” Grylls said. “In terms of survival, you will not get more of a Wild West frontier than helping kids decipher, discern and be wise and smart about information and where they are sourcing information from.”