OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Back Bill to Fund 'AI Literacy' in Schools

rebolek

Of course they will back it up. Nice source of income.

schnitzelstoat

It reminds me of the 'IT Literacy' classes we had when I was in high school where they just taught us to use Microsoft Office products.

fantasizr

this is a step beyond the drug dealers who give you the first sample for free. Attempts at legally mandated injection sites.

righthand

I thought AI was so easy to use no one would have to be trained? Are they going to teach the kids to steal copyrighted data? And write AI slop articles? And to evangelize useless side projects as time savings?

sublinear

It will be interesting to see the backlash to this one.

charcircuit

The entirety of school should eventually be replaced with just this one class. AI is able to teach people anything they may want or need to know and it can design effective ways for people to study. Being able to use, interpret, and work together with AI is going to be one of the most important skills of the 21st century.

cavino

The thing about AI is it'll teach you how to use it (aka 'AI literacy').

HomeDeLaPot

Maybe a more general focus on getting students to practice critical thinking and fact-checking would be better. AI could be addressed as a small part of that, since chatbots are everywhere and students need to know how to filter out their BS. But are NSF grants really necessary for this? To what degree is this funneling taxpayer money to buy ChatGPT subscriptions and advertise to students by getting them to use AI in the classroom?

kmeisthax

If by "AI literacy" they mean "learning how AI works and how to use it effectively", then this probably would wind up backfiring. Because when you improve people's AI literacy, they use it less. They don't swear off it, but because they know what it is and is not good for, they are way more cautious in their application of AI. Of course, they probably plan to do to education what iPads did to education: deskill children. Apple successfully abliterated the concept of a file from a generation of students by making them do their computing in a straitjacket. I can only imagine how an AI-first or AI-only educational curriculum could make kids even worse at using computers.

slopinthebag

Gotta get em hooked while they're young.

nalekberov

What is ‘AI Literacy’? How to prepare a prompt for maximum token efficiency?

hsuduebc2

Of course they do when it must be taught on their products which will hook the users in time and make some money.

ndiddy

The other day I read this piece on how AI is already being used in schools, and it left quite an impression on me. https://archive.is/IW4B3 > The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one. I'm not as anti-AI as the author of the piece, and I think that AI could have a role as a teaching aid. It's infinitely patient and it's able to adapt to a student's needs better than a textbook. Still, I hate the idea of students being encouraged to entirely offload their cognitive work onto an online service rather than think for themselves. The point of making fifth graders write essays, make art, design presentations, etc isn't the end product, it's that they now have the experience of having done the assignment. I would rather see students get taught how to think creatively, analyze a piece of writing, coherently explain an opinion, or draw a picture on their own, instead of giving this up in exchange for the nebulous skill of being "AI native" (aka being able to ask a computer to produce work for you).

marricks

> Young people increasingly hate AI[1], and children already struggle with AI-enabled harassment that traumatizes them and disrupts their learning. And studies show kids are offloading learning onto AI models, undermining their education and social development. [1] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/g... The coyote is already running beyond the cliff so indoctrinating kids won't save them from an AI winter 6-18 months away.

nathan_compton

This is the reason I recently ran for my kids school board. I use AI every day and I think there is a lot of utility there, but I don't want it anywhere near my kids school. Honestly, I don't think kids need to even lay eyes on a screen until they are in highschool.

wiseowise

Got to train serfs early!

saidinesh5

Putting all the cynicism side.. it's amazing how big the changes in how we deal with information in our life time changed.. When I was younger, to solve a problem, we had to memorize a large amount of information. Or know someone who does. Or visit libraries and pray they have a book on what you need. Then came the internet. All of that memorizing was replaced by web searches. You just focus on solving the problem, figuring out what you don't know and searching for that. Now, it feels like we're automating the searching, connecting the dots and most of the problem solving. We focus on the high level problem description, verification of the results. I wonder what they'd be adding to this curriculum. Now, it feels like we're even offloading

samagragune

The conflict of interest is pretty obvious. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are backing a bill that funds teaching kids to use... OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft products. "AI literacy" as defined in the bill is literally "the ability to use artificial intelligence effectively." That's not literacy, that's onboarding lol. Real digital literacy teaches how systems work, who profits from them, and how to think critically about them. This bill will in practice hand curriculum design to the same vendors who endorsed it. Teaching kids to prompt ChatGPT is not the same as teaching them to understand what ChatGPT is. Nobody funding this wants the latter.

jmclnx

What a big waste of $, for an example how did the 'coding' schools go ? AI literacy will go the same way. How about funding something useful ? Like real literacy as in reading books ? That will help kids out far better than "AI literacy".

moolcool

This is way too close to the Simpsons joke about the periodic tables provided by Oscar Mayer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pohXWbMrXZI