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Against AI literacy: have we actually found a way to reverse learning?

On the necessity of relief cuts; BCIT SW9

(Apr 19, 2025) Against AI literacy: have we actually found a way to reverse learning?
https://themindfile.substack.com/p/against-ai-literacy-have-we-actually

Miriam Reynoldson

  • “critical AI literacy”
  • Using AI is not about communicating. It’s about avoiding communicating. It’s about not reading, not writing, not drawing, not seeing. It’s about ceding our powers of expression and comprehension to digital apps that will cushion us from fully participating in our own lives.
  • But it’s a scaffold, not the thing itself (chicken nuggets)
  • I’m genuinely ok with training wheels, but I ultimately want to see you ride without them.
    • Because the irony is this: if you can’t ride without them, you can’t actually ride with them either.
  • On “generative AI”: I’m going to keep spelling this out. No more abbreviations. We need to get used to recognising that LLMs and image-generating GANs are a very, very narrow subset of machine learning technologies, with a miniscule set of viable use cases.

Rachel Horst UBC MET Why AI Literacy? (A rsponse to the above)

Literacy gives us a map to disagree on.

  • I know everyone tends to think their area of study is the centre of the universe, but for me, literacy truly is at the centre of human experience. I believe the question—what is literacy?—is exactly the right one to be asking now. And always.
  • The idea of literacy as a neutral skill or linear continuum has given way to more complex, rhizomatic understandings of a multiplicity of literacies, none of them value-neutral.
  • See CV https://www.rachelhorst.ca/aboutme/

Following 2025 June Tech Ed Inquiry Guest Lecture_Moylan

Krügel, S., Ostermaier, A., & Uhl, M. (2023). ChatGPT’s inconsistent moral advice influences users’ judgment. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 4569-4569. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31341-0

ChatGPT corrupts rather than improves its users’ moral judgment.

More to add

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Ihde

Stop calling it “AI literacy” if it doesn’t teach history
https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/stop-calling-it-ai-literacy-if-it-doesnt-teach-history

Many AI literacy programs are billed as preparing all students for a future where AI is ubiquitous. But to truly empower all students, any form of literacy must be grounded in history – particularly history told from the viewpoints of non-dominant groups. As Virginia Eubanks beautifully concluded in Automating Inequality, we all live among the digital traps we have laid for the destitute.

(June 22, 2025) The role of the University is to resist AI
https://danmcquillan.org/cpct_seminar.html

(June 25, 2025) Bespoke or prescribed? The myth of personalised learning
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/bespoke-or-prescribed-myth-personalised-learning