Most of you reading this are almost certainly college students or young professionals who have interacted with AI at least once, be it asking ChatGPT to give you an APA citation, or the Google Gemini search summaries haunting our daily lives, to making a silly image generation request of Stable Diffusion. But no CMU student has time to read research articles for fun. To start with, let’s summarize this call-to-action article from Forbes defining what AI literacy is and what it entails–albeit with additional commentary from me.
Functional literacy, the ability to apply literacy skills to real-world tasks, has varied throughout the years with each addition of new technologies redefining what literacy even entails. Firstly, reading itself and education have been an upper-class privilege for most of human history. It’s the past 100 or so years that have marked the most dramatic changes: first computer and technology literacy, followed by the advent of artificial intelligence literacy. AI seems to be the future’s iPhone; it is on track to be immersed in every aspect of our lives. Hence, the importance of this issue: try imagining a world without your smartphone!
What most of the general population doesn't dwell on is the fact that we are looking at the next step in literacy and technological advancement. This is more than using a book to store and record information, or even the Memex-style brain-augmentation offered by the World Wide Web. In my opinion, rather than a tool for enhancing the human mind or communication, we are on track to build minds: self-thinking systems that couldn’t even have been envisioned 50 years ago.
“First movers will gain exceptional power, and everyone else will be, to an extent, left behind.” – John Werner, Billions Of People Need To Learn AI Literacy, Jul 17, 2024
Additionally, this new literacy movement is the same as all those before it. This quote taken from the Forbes article seems to echo centuries-old themes regarding class struggle rather than an offhanded comment about a humble technological tool (much like a fancy kitchen gadget or, say, a weed whacker) we can choose to utilize or not. It hints at the shift that occurs every time technology advances–new innovations undebatably shape our world. But AI is harder to comprehensively criticize, let alone fully wrap your mind around, being a system that your parents’ generation could not have even imagined. And I daresay that AI has a wider impact on our lives than a weed-whacker.
Matt Crabtree of Data Camp described AI literacy as:
“[AI literacy is] about viewing these technologies critically, understanding their context, and questioning their design and implementation. It's also about being able to discern the benefits and challenges of AI while making informed decisions about its use.”
This quote prompts me to picture a world where AI has been left to fester with its problems unchecked, unquestioned, and uncriticized. This might be cynical of me, but it’s not a pretty vision.
As AI becomes more and more integrated in our society and infrastructure, those who are lower in literacy will suffer. Much like the health illiteracy shown during the COVID-19 pandemic (see this NHS article), AI literacy has the very real consequence of affecting the lives of those who lack it. For now, AI remains on the outskirts of day-to-day life, but it creeps increasingly closer. As AI evolves and advances further, our understanding of its functions will need to adapt with it. How will those who are illiterate navigate a world that uses it more and more? I believe that if we don’t begin to question and criticize this new technology from the start, the disadvantageous divide between those who know how to navigate AI and those who don’t will only grow. Far beyond just knowing how to operate systems that use it, we need to be able to understand, evaluate, and make informed decisions about AI.
But it’s more than just literacy. The more people who understand AI systems and all their implications, the more diverse a range of voices that we’ll have to criticize these systems, leading to benefits for all. Governance and regulations will only do so much when our legislators themselves are illiterate in AI. The systems that are already showing bias in their infancy will only grow unchecked and spawn more malice. In short, it’s not enough to simply fear or avoid AI usage due to environmental impact or ethical concerns; we have a duty to understand the monster at hand to tame it and utilize it to benefit lives rather than the harm it’s currently causing.