Margaret Thornton — "Nana Meg" to her 2.4 million TikTok followers — did not intend to become Canada's most-watched AI educator. She just wanted to figure out why her iPad kept suggesting strange photos.
Eighteen months ago, the retired school librarian from Sudbury, Ontario started posting short videos about her experiments with AI tools. Her first video — "I asked the robot to write a poem about my cat and this is what happened" — got 4,000 views. Her most recent video, a step-by-step tutorial on using AI to create a personalized family cookbook, has been viewed 11.2 million times.
What makes Nana Meg's content different from the thousands of AI tutorial channels flooding the internet is her refusal to use jargon. There are no discussions of "large language models" or "inference speed." There are discussions of "what this button does" and "why this matters for your grandchildren."
Nana Meg has been invited to speak at three universities this spring and was recently named to Canada's National AI Literacy Advisory Panel — a volunteer role she accepted immediately. "Someone needs to make sure they remember the people who don't already have a PhD," she told reporters. "That's my job."