By Susanna Coghlan, Europe Business Development Manager at Quidgest
AI literacy is now a key competency for the future. Yet, defining the scope of AI literacy is challenging. As a broad reaching technology, and term which is often broadly applied, AI plays a different role in different contexts. The rise of generative AI, for instance, has significantly reshaped how people interact with AI and view its role in our lives.
Indeed,legal experts in the field, such as Luiza Jarovsky, Co-founder of the AI, Tech & Privacy Academy, advocate that AI literacy must also include privacy and governance, stating in a recent newsletter to her 50,000+ subscribers, that “Understanding AI´s legal and ethical issues, governance frameworks, applicable laws, and responsible AI practices is just as important as navigating the technical aspects.” But as Andrew Cox of the University of Sheffield highlights in his paper Algorithmic Literacy, AI Literacy and Responsible Generative AI Literacy, “AI has philosophical and ethical dimensions that are hard to fully relate to technologies. There is a need to learn underlying persistent skills not solely how to use specific tools.”
As digital technologies reshape our reality, literacy assumes much more than the use of basic techniques or technical skills – it demands a multifaceted ability to interpret, understand, respond, and anticipate.New technologies themselves can change what we value. It´s not a binary good-or-bad, this-or-that. But an evolutive, or even ecological, journey. It changes our environment and how we operate in it.
That’s why literacy, computer literacy, technological literacy, and now AI literacy is more than just understanding the technology. The EU AI Continent Action Plan directly addresses literacy and skills within the four pillars of the plan and tools such as UNESCO´s AI Competency Framework for Students are essential resources for navigating how to use and stay safe when engaging with AI. While thisencompasses how to try and stay safer online, awareness of privacy and security risks, and conscious decision making about what we do and don´t share with AI, literacy must also include engaging with the change that AI is creating in our society. It must include participation of a multiplicity of people and perspectives.
Participation means not only having the knowledge and skill to follow thetechnological change, but it is also about being in the conversation about what and how change is happening. A process which starts not with the deployment of AI, but with design, development, and decision making. Participation is about taking the conversation to the community. As TimmitGebru, Founder & Executive Director at The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and author of the forthcoming book The View from Somewhere (a memoir and manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities) advocates in her interview with Paris Marx on the Tech Won´t Save Us Podcast, “we must meet people where they are at”.
Participation is an essential pillar of AI literacy as a society. It stands at the core of steering AI toward inclusive prosperity, particularly for marginalized groups. But this requires a deeper examination of the scope, limitations, potential uses and misuses of AI, and the role of literacy within the broader AI development ecosystem. It is not a simple proposition. And as with many other AI initiatives it also risks imbalance and exclusion. It can be time consuming, hard to pin down, and harder to execute. And because change is constant, participation is not finite, but a conversation that continues. Yet without it, we risk a future of even greater imbalance and insecurity.
If we are to meet the optimistic vision of AI intended to deeply support human agency and enhance prosperity, then opening up that conversation to the whole of our global humanity is the launch pad for realizing the best of our AI ambitions.
BIO – Susanna Coghlan is Quidgest´s Europe Business Development Manager. She works with Quidgest partners and clients on projects for digital transformation and delivering technology change.
