For me, being critical goes beyond critique and scepticism: it includes subscribing to critical theory and critical pedagogy – developing awareness of social justice issues and cultivating in learners a disposition to redress them. The elements of critical AI literacy in my view are:
- Understanding how GenAI works
- Recognising inequalities and biases within GenAI
- Examining ethical issues in GenAI
- Crafting effective prompts
- Assessing appropriate uses of GenAI
Where are the crescents in AI? by Maha Bali
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Maha Bali discusses the need for cultivating critical AI literacy. She reflects on ideas and exercises that she has used as a part of her course on digital literacies and intercultural learning. After unpacking each of the areas, with elaborations and examples, she ends with a series of questions to consider:
I think we should always question the use of AI in education for several reasons. Can we position AI as a tutor that supports learning, when we know AI hallucinates often? Even when we train AI as an expert system that has expert knowledge, are we offering this human-less education to those less privileged while keeping the human-centric education to more privileged populations? Why are we considering using technology in the first place – what problems does it solve? What are alternative non-tech solutions that are more social and human? What do we lose from the human socioemotional dimensions of teacher-student and student-student interactions when we replace these with AI? Students, teachers, and policymakers need to develop critical AI literacy in order to make reasonable judgments about these issues.
Where are the crescents in AI? by Maha Bali
This discussion of critical, more than just critique, reminds me of Doug Belshaw’s digital literacies:
- Digital literacies are about process as much as product
- Lets move beyond good and evil and focus on choice and consequence
- Literacy starts with you, curate rather than be curated
In Search of an Understanding of Digital Literacies Worth Having by Aaron Davis
As well as my piece on Cambridge Analytica and the need to critically reflect and ask questions.
I think that the most important thing we can do is wonder. This helps go beyond the how-to to the how-do-they-do-that.
Secret, Safe and Informed: A Reflection on Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the Collection of Data by Aaron Davis