AI Literate or AI Idiot
The title of this post deserves an explanation. I wish I were sufficiently clever to have come up with it, but it was crafted by a student. Ernie is a community college student who chairs the Artificial Intelligence Club at the school and has been a collaborator in our efforts to understand AI for our community of students, faculty, and staff. He proposed this title to frame an upcoming talk he and the club members made for a community group meeting on campus. A staff member was asked to speak on how students are using AI in class, and that person asked Ernie and the club to take their place in the program for the day.
Ernie was asked to change the title of the talk, which he did, and he demonstrated sound judgement in doing so. He is going to be a business leader and potentially alienating those who may be his boss or colleagues in the near future was not in his best interest.
Ernie made a great point in his talk. There are folks who are literate with AI and there are folks who are idiots with AI. We all have a duty to understand the differences.
Before going any further, it is work clarifying literate and idiot. We know the phase to be literate to have useful knowledge of a field. To be scientifically literate means to understand what it is and how it works so that we make informed decisions including getting vaccines. To be an idiot, as Ernie and I define it, means to act in a manner opposite that of those who are literate. Interestingly, scientifically literature people change their minds when the data says they should, and they evaluate the quality of the data used to change their minds.
I did not have the opportunity to hear Ernie’s presentation. I heard many in the audience appeared to have connected with what he and his colleagues said. For myself, I am talking Ernie’s lead and posting on how we might differentiate AI literates from AI idiots. What is it that makes one able to use generative AI in a manner that is clear what they are doing and why they are doing it.
First, they use generative AI and are transparent about what they are doing with it. We admit which tools we use, how we use it, and what we do with the content AI creates for us.
Second, we are skeptical of the data we get from it. We always read it, listen to it, or watch it. We are critical of it and assume there is something worth questioning in what it has delivered.
Third, we allow it to contribute to our thinking, but rarely is it immediately deliverable. I am drafting my fourth book right now and I use AI as a tool to see what I might have missed when crafting a section. Most of the content AI delivers to me is mundane, very mundane. I work as an educational technology professional, and I write for them; nothing is as important as AI says it is.
Fourth, we change our minds as it is appropriate. Tools come and they go, we adopt the good ones, and we abandon those that are not. We adapt what we do to those good uses of AI. We also accept AI; we use it for what it was never intended to be.
In conclusion, pay attention to users of AI. If they are critical, transparent, and adaptable in its use, they are probably not an AI idiot.