It is great to hear about efforts to teach AI literacy, particularly for non-technical people.
There is ongoing academic debate on whether one can teach AI literacy to undergraduate students across majors, and if yes, how. This article reports a case study: a three-week midterm project embedded in an undergraduate “AI-for-all” course. Students designed reasoning tasks, ran controlled comparisons across widely used chatbots, and evaluated both answer correctness and explanation validity. Through field experience, students with no STEM background learned what consumer chatbots can and cannot do, documenting systematic brittleness across models that “sounded right but reasoned wrong.” More critically, students built understanding of how to evaluate AI outputs. The midterm gave them agency as investigators rather than passive users. Eager to share their discoveries, they are co-authors of this article. Together, we offer here to educators and the broader scientific community a concrete example of the operationalization of AI literacy as experimental practice. The method, however, is not specific to the classroom. It shows any user how to test an AI system rather than trust it blindly.
AI Literacy as Experimental Practice: Students as Investigators, by Amarda Shehu, Adonyas Ababu, Asma Akbary, Griffin Allen, Aroush Baig, Tereana Battle, Elias Beall, Christopher Byrom, Matt Dean, Kate Demarco, Ethan Douglass, Luis Granados, Layla Hantush, Andy Hay, Eleanor Hay, Caleb Jackson, Jaewon Jang, Carter Jones, Quanyang Li, Adrian Lopez, Logan Massimo, Garrett McMullin, Ariana Maldonado, Eman Mirza, Hadiya Muddasar, Sara Nuwayhid, Brandon Pak, Ashley Petty, Dryden Rancourt, Lily Rodriguez, Corbin Rogers, Jacob Schiek, Taeseo Seok, Aarav Sethi, Giovanni Vitela, Winston Williams, Jagan Yetukuri.
AI literacy will become an essential skill for the (knowledge) workplace and beyond. In the cited paper, I particularly like the emphasis on distinguishing between quality (correctness) of answer and quality (validity) of the provided rationale.