This AI Literacy Review covers AI literacy for people with low/no digital skills, fear from employees about AI at work, more gender gaps in AI, cultural values of LLMs, AI literacy among librarians in Zambia, U.S. Department of Education’s AI toolkit, Department of Education of Puerto Rico’s AI report, University of Adelaide’s AI literacy framework, responses from school districts, and the health and wellness impacts of AI on children.
General
The Good Things Foundation releases a report titled Developing AI Literacy With People Who Have Low Or No Digital Skills in light of 8.5 million people in the UK lacking even basic digital skills. The report finds that people need foundational digital and media literacy skills first, and support from community organizations and libraries to develop AI literacy.
In New SAP Research Shows Mixed Attitudes Around AI at Work, Revealing Why AI Literacy Is Imperative, a survey of 4,000 managers and employees found that people with low AI literacy were much more likely to feel apprehensive, afraid, and distressed about using AI at work. Meanwhile, 70% of people with high AI literacy expected to see positive outcomes from its use at work. These differences continued in their beliefs about using AI in performance reviews, compensation, and promotion.
In the working paper Global Evidence on Gender Gaps and Generative AI by Nicholas G. Otis, Solène Delecourt, Katelyn Cranney, and Rembrand Koning, the authors review 16 studies showing an AI gender gap in nearly all regions, sectors, and occupations. Even when studies offered participants the chance to use AI tools, women were less likely to use them. The authors call for targeted interventions that address structural and behavioral barriers in AI usage.
In the journal article Cultural bias and cultural alignment of large language models, Yan Tao et al. evaluate cultural bias in five large language models and show that all of them reflect cultural values from English-speaking and Protestant European countries. The paper includes a map of 107 countries charting how the models compare on cultural values scales.
In the working paper Large Language Models Reflect the Ideology of their Creators, Maarten Buyl et al. look at the differences in how Western and non-Western large language models respond to prompts about prominent and controversial figures in world history.
Pieter den Hamer in Five steps for organizations to create an AI literacy roadmap looks at how AI literacy can be developed throughout an organization through five steps, including communication, needs analysis, and assessment.
Canada’s 19th annual media literacy week includes a new AI literacy initiative with a ‘break the fake’ house hippo campaign and other resources funded by the Government and Meta.
Stibo Systems’ report surveying 500 business leaders in the U.S. titled AI: The High-Stakes Gamble for Enterprises finds many of them have rushed AI adoption, aren’t engaging in AI ethics training, and want more training on how to responsibly use AI.
McKinsey releases a study showing that Portugal needs to train 30% of its workers (1.3 million) to work with Gen. AI to close the productivity gap with the European Union by 2030.
Libraries
The paper AI Literacy and Zambian Librarians: A Study of Perceptions and Applications by Abid Fakhre Alam, A. Subaveerapandiyan, Dalitso Mvula, and Neelam Tiwary looks at AI literacy in Zambian academic libraries, including librarians’ perceptions, applications, and awareness of AI technologies. They surveyed 82 librarians and found a solid understanding of AI fundamentals but also a need for enhanced AI expertise, some resistance to change, and budgetary constraints.
Education
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology releases the 79-page Empowering Education Leaders: A Toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable AI Integration for AI use in the classroom that has three sections: mitigating risk, building a strategy for AI integration in the instructional core, and maximizing opportunity, along with appendices on key terms, initiatives, and scenarios.
The University of Adelaide’s Library releases the Artificial Intelligence Literacy Framework to help students understand AI and use it ethically in their studies. It is organized into four categories: Recognise and Understand, Use and Apply, Evaluate and Critique, Reflect and Respect. The university also provides recordings of a masterclass in Gen. AI from March 2024 and a library guide about what AI is and how to use it in an academic setting.
The Department of Education of Puerto Rico releases the paper La inteligencia artificial en el sistema educativo (AI in the Educational System) covering the responsible integration of AI technologies into education. (see Pat Yongpradit’s LInkedin post for a machine translation via Google)
Arizona school districts engage in a state-wide AI literacy challenge from the Arizona Institute for Education and the Economy in partnership with Northern Arizona University, with the creation of resources, tips, and staff training.
AI for Education partners with Carnegie Learning to accelerate AI literacy training for classrooms across the US.
In What Makes Students (and the Rest of Us) Fall for AI Misinformation? Sam Wineburg (Stanford University) and Nadav Ziv (Digital Inquiry Group) look at empowering students with search literacy and skepticism for online sources due to the risks posed by chatbots and inaccurate information.
In What can be learned from early adopters of AI? About a third of 40 school districts who were first to use artificial intelligence lack formal policies on the tool, a CRPE analysis found, the Center on Reinventing Public Education suggests that early AI adopters invest in AI literacy for all adults and students in their district and focus on the needs of the community in their use of AI.
The article Generative Artificial Intelligence and university study: a guide for students by the Study Advice team at the University of Reading reflects on the process of staff creating a student-facing Gen. AI guide for AI literacy support and attempting to balance the needs of various stakeholders.
Google’s Be Internet Legends program offers an Understanding AI assembly that was streamed to 152 schools reaching 22,800 students and aimed to explain AI to children in an engaging way. The assembly recording is available on YouTube.
The parents of a student in the state of Massachusetts are suing the high school after the student was penalized for using Gen. AI to help with a project, and they are requesting that the school provide training in the use of AI to staff, according to Education Week’s article Parents Sue After School Disciplined Student for AI Use: Takeaways for Educators.
Patrick Hickey cautions parents and educators to understand how youth are using Snapchat AI and to learn enough about the tech to guide students’ ethical usage and know its limitations (see Patrick Hickey’s LinkedIn post).
Nick Potkalitsky surfaces a report titled The Future of Child Development in the AI Era. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives Between AI and Child Development Experts by Mathilde Neugnot-Cerioli and Olga Muss Laurenty about how the discussions about AI literacy should also include considerations of health and wellness, due to how children’s neurons are shaped by their environment and how chatbots might negatively impact physical and mental skills such as sleep patterns and executive functioning. (see Nick Potkalitsky’s LinkedIn post)
