This AI Literacy Review explores youth and parental views on Generative AI, how AI affects freelancers and creators, AI in HR, AI laws in EU and South Korea, AI symposiums, law school requiring AI education, Harvard’s Institutional Data Initiative, Stanford’s AI research repository, World Economic Forum’s 2025 Jobs Report, UNESCO’s International Education Day 2025, U.S. Department of Education’s report on navigating AI, a pedagogy benchmark leaderboard for LLMs, AI’s environmental impact, and more!
General
Harvard, Common Sense, and Hopelab publish the report Teen and Young Adult Perspectives on Generative AI: Patterns of use, excitements, and concerns based on findings from a 2024 U.S. survey of digital technology and youth mental health. Key points are that 51% of young people (14-22) had used Gen. AI but only 4% were daily users. They most commonly used AI for getting information and brainstorming, as well as help with schoolwork and making images, and there were differences in usage based on ethnicity.
The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Jobs Report sees digital access and advancements in technology including AI as the trends expected by businesses to be transformative in the coming years. AI and big data are on the list of fastest-growing skills, as is technology literacy. Skill gaps are identified as a major barrier by 63% of employers looking at the next five years. The report shows that Gen. AI has a moderate to high capacity for substituting humans in different skills, including reading, writing, mathematics, marketing, media, and attention to detail.
Foundry10’s whitepaper Navigating AI as a Family: Caregivers’ Perspectives and Strategies by Jennifer Rubin et al. looks at how caregivers perceive Gen. AI tools and includes recommendations and strategies for families on the integration of AI into their households.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California’s IT Division launches the Berkeley Lab AI Mastery (BLAM!) program, a six-week training to make AI accessible and practical for employees. Resources will be aimed at three groups: beginners, those already familiar with the tools, and coders, and the program will include webinars, readings, videos, and challenges.
In AI Skills that Matter, Part 2: Lateral Reading, Eric Hudson discusses how it’s hard to figure out what it means to critically evaluate LLM output, but that a concept called lateral reading can help us investigate the context of the source, claim, and yourself in the age of Generative AI.
In Advancing AI Literacy: A Vision for Inclusive AI Education and Practice in the Nigerian newspaper This Day, Chizorom Ebosie Okoronkwo writes about the AI literacy gap and the need for culturally relevant and community-based approaches to educational initiatives.
In Navigating AI’s Tensions to Create a Roadmap for AI Literacy, Eric Duell lists the tensions at play with AI and what they mean for decision-making, including creator vs. consumer responsibility and personal voice vs. synthetic persona.
The Canada-based non-profit Society for AI Literacy aims to deliver free AI education to the general public through interviews with professionals, presentations to high schools, and social media content.
In AI’s impact on energy and water usage, Jon Ippolito offers nine takeaways from recent research about energy and water consumption of AI companies, models, data centers, and prompting, acknowledging the limitations in making estimations due to lack of information.
Jessica L. Parker and Kimberly Pace Becker write in The Invisible Drift: How AI Reshapes Academic Knowledge about how research can transform from tentative findings into seemingly broad principles as it spreads, and how we need to be mindful of how AI will continue this pattern and potentially threaten the integrity of academic knowledge.
The conference paper AI and Freelancers: Has the Inflection Point Arrived? by D. Qiao, H. Rui, and Q. Xiong looks at how AI influences freelancers, including reducing or increasing their work volume and earnings, and at what point humans may be replaced by AI.
The podcast episode How Organizations Can Measure Progress in Data & AI Literacy looks at how organizations can assess their success through different measurements.
NVIDIA offers free AI courses on the basics of AI and data science, including AI for All: From Basics to GenAI Practice and Generative AI Explained.
Digital Workforce Services launches online learning platform AgentAcademy.ai with a free course on Understanding Agentic AI.
SmarterX launches the AI Literacy Project to make AI education accessible and personalized, with free resources including intro classes, webinars, newsletters, a podcast, and a Slack community.
Human Resources (HR)
The Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK releases the AI in Recruitment Outcomes Report along with a webinar that covers the benefits and risks of AI tools in recruitment.
Daniel Shapero, LinkedIn’s COO, says an increasingly asked interview question is ‘Tell me a story about how you used AI at the workplace or at home’ and a person’s response shows how comfortable they are with the technology.
Report: Despite AI growth, most HR leaders aren’t focused on reskilling workers discusses research that shows that most HR leaders are not reskilling workers who are at risk of having their job tasks taken by AI, instead prioritizing pilots and use cases for AI. Only 21% of leaders said they’re developing AI literacy programs for the workforce.
Government
The first portions of the EU AI Act come into effect in February 2025, including the ones surrounding AI literacy and prohibited AI practices. Darren Coxon has a one-hour video and blog with an overview of how schools need to be compliant (see Darren Coxon’s LinkedIn post)
South Korea is the next country to pass a comprehensive AI law called Basic Law on AI Development and Trust-Based Establishment set to take effect in 2026.
In United States: California’s AI wave – Navigating a new era of regulation in 2025, Baker & McKenzie summarize the key takeaways of AI-related legislation taking effect in California in 2025, including the definition of personal information, performers’ rights, AI in healthcare, synthetic election content, and AI literacy in schools.
The U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a museum operated by the Alabama government, hosts the second annual AI symposium with experts discussing how to improve AI literacy among the public.
Law
The University of Reading is calling for submissions to present at its November 5, 2025 symposium on the topic of Empowering Equal Opportunities and AI Literacy in Global Legal Education and how students will be prepared for their legal careers.
Case Western Reserve School of Law becomes the first U.S. law school to require legal AI education certification for first-year students, and the “Introduction to AI and the Law” program will give students hands-on experience with AI legal tools and discuss ethics and future legal technologies.
Harvard Law School Library launches the Institutional Data Initiative to collaborate with libraries, government agencies, and other groups to help them publish their collections as data for different uses, including for AI. Their initial activity is to release 1 million books in the public domain that were part of the Google Books project, and to work with Boston Public Library to scan millions of pages from newspapers.
Education
UNESCO dedicates International Education Day 2025 (January 24) to the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence, and Director-General Audrey Azoulay calls on member states to invest in teacher and student training on responsible use of AI in education. African member states are moving forward with strategies and forums focused on leveraging AI in education. The UNESCO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean held an event exploring how AI technology can assist with the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 4 relating to education.
Commonwealth Secretary-General, The Rt Hon Patricia Scotland KC, writes about the work the Commonwealth is doing to support AI and education, including free courses through the Commonwealth AI Academy and partnership with Nigeria for AI literacy for students and civil servants.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology releases the report Navigating Artificial Intelligence in Postsecondary Education: Building Capacity for the Road Ahead to support leaders trying to implement AI at their institution. There are five recommendations, including developing a clear vision, creating infrastructure, assessing AI tools, and seeking cross-industry collaboration.
The UK Department for Education releases guidance titled Generative AI: product safety expectations for edtech developers that outlines the features that their Gen. AI systems should meet to be considered safe in education.
The State University of New York (SUNY) system is adding AI education to its general education core competencies, so starting in autumn 2026, there will be lessons about AI ethics and literacy as part of the information literacy competency.
Eight districts in Colorado are part of a year-long project building AI literacy offered through the Colorado Education Initiative and are using AI tools like Magic School and ChatGPT to review code, do research, and investigate biases.
The AI for Education org publishes a Pedagogy Benchmark leaderboard to compare how large language models work on pedagogy knowledge and best practices in teaching such as planning and adapting learning for students.
In From chalkboards to chatbots: Transforming learning in Nigeria, one prompt at a time from the World Bank blog, Martín E. De Simone et al. discuss three key findings from a pilot of Generative AI in an after-school program in Benin City, Nigeria: the six-week intervention boosted learning, even more so for girls, more sessions equaled bigger gains, and the improvements were equivalent to two years of typical learning.
Stanford University launches the GenAI for Education hub with a Research Study Repository that collects academic research papers on Gen. AI in one place, with filters for application, user, age, study design, etc.
Danny Liu and Simon Bates release a whitepaper titled Generative AI in Higher Education: Current Practices and Ways Forward on areas of action and a call for transformative change in preparing university staff and students for an AI-enabled future, centered on a ‘CRAFT’ framework – Culture, Rules, Access, Familiarity, and Trust. Two key priorities identified are having universities move beyond competition to instead cooperate on Gen. AI approaches, and having students elevated to partners through programs and development processes. (read Danny Liu’s Linked article summarizing the whitepaper)
Adobe and Advanis release the Creativity with AI in Education 2025 Report based on a survey of 2,801 educators across the US and UK. Some findings are that 91% saw enhanced learning when their students used creative AI, 86% believe knowledge of how to use Gen. AI will improve students’ chances of getting a job, and 82% found positive effects on student well-being and engagement when creative activities were incorporated into the classroom.
In the working paper GenAI-101: What Undergraduate Students Need to Know and Actually Know About Generative AI, authors Sina Rismanchian, Eesha Tur Razia Babar, and Shayan Doroudi survey students about Generative AI literacy and found that 60% use chatbots regularly for academic tasks but tend to overestimate what these AI tools can do.
In the article Exploring EFL Students’ AI Literacy in Academic Writing: Insights into Familiarity, Knowledge and Ethical Perceptions, authors Zakir Hossain, Özgür Çelik, and Gökhan Hiniz look at AI literacy of 427 students in Turkish universities and find a need for more targeted and structured AI education for English as a Foreign Language students as they use AI in writing.
In the audio episode Enabling Students with AI Skills: Unpacking the AI CHECKLIST Model, host Narun Nahar along with Sue Beckingham and Peter Hartley discuss the AI Checklist Model and strategies to adapt it to different disciplines.
In the TeachNet podcast Developing AI Literacy in Schools, Irene Stone from a Dublin school discusses using Generative AI in her senior cycle computer science class and the need for teachers to become AI literate first.
The National Parents Union Survey on K-12 parents’ views on topics in education shows that 22% have a detailed understanding of how AI works, 31% say they know general info but not many details, 39% know a little, and 7% don’t know anything about AI. The majority thought that AI would have a mostly positive or equally positive and negative impact on their family’s quality of life in the next decade. 54% said their child’s school has not provided info about school policies on AI tools, and 59% said the school has not asked parents for feedback on AI usage. Meanwhile, 81% of parents said they want to be involved in decisions on AI tool usage at school.
In Why Data & AI Literacy are Important Skills for K-12 Students, Hank Pellissier says U.S. schools are lagging behind in teaching data literacy and what the benefits of both data and AI literacy are for K-12 students, not just university students.
The interview with MIT Dean for Digital Learning Cynthia Breazeal, MIT Scientist: AI Literacy has Already Arrived at a School Near You, explores how MIT is integrating AI literacy into the curriculum through events like Day of AI and that the next big thing is validated assessments to measure AI literacy alongside curriculum objectives.
In AI has created a dilemma in higher education in China Daily, Xiang Chengdong discusses Fudan University’s recent decision to regulate the use of AI in undergraduate dissertations, and the need for a balance between innovation and regulation in higher education.
In Ohio task force launches resources, recommendations for how to use AI in schools, Madeline Mitchell reports on the Ohio AI in Education Strategy’s toolkit with recommendations for AI policies and guidance on which resources to use to build AI literacy into education programs. The toolkit was developed by a coalition of groups including educators, AI experts, and industry representatives.
The University of Southern California is rolling out a graduate-level AI course on the technology’s role in digital media, with educator Tina Austin calling for collaborators or guest lecturers. (see Tina Austin’s LinkedIn post)
In As CXD introduces AI to Bootcamp, students and faculty discuss initiatives to increase AI literacy, Kaya Patel reports on the Career Exploration and Development Center’s (CXD) endorsement of AI during the Sophomore Bootcamp at Bowdoin College and the goal to make sure students know about the resources they can use in their job applications.
Dan Fitzpatrick writes about how California State University (CSU) is partnering with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu access to all of its students and staff across 23 campuses and position itself as a leader in AI-powered education.
The Davis Institute for AI at the liberal arts-focused Colby College in Maine is using a portal called Mule Chat that provides access to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama to students and faculty. A team of student tutors has taken a semester-long course on the portal and is now guiding others through how to use it.
Simone Hirsch reveals the contributors to the upcoming AI in Education Sydney 2025 free hybrid event scheduled for March 14, 2025 with a range of speakers on AI in education and the launch of a virtual Community of Practice.
In AI is Fabricating Misinformation: A Call for AI Literacy in the Classroom, librarian Laurie Bridges writes about the issue of AI hallucinations and the ethical responsibility to teach students both how to use AI and how to critically evaluate it.
A similar article from the Disinformation Social Media Alliance (DISA) titled Combating Misinformation through AI Literacy Education looks at the hallucination issue and the danger of relying on Generative AI for factual information, and that fact-checking the volume of information they can produce is daunting.
Darren Coxon discusses the emerging issue of AI-generated academic articles, made easier by AI tools such as STORM and SciSpace, and how AI literacy needs to incorporate this aspect of determining quality scholarship going forward. (see Darren Coxon’s LinkedIn post)
Nick Potkalitsky shares his complete AI Literacy Manual with three pathways (exploratory inquiry, targeted inquiry, and generative engagement) and that positions AI literacy at the intersection of rhetorical and media analysis. (see Nick Potkalitsky’s LinkedIn post)
