CONCEPT
AI Literacy
The capacity to understand, question, and exercise informed judgment about artificial intelligence—not how to build neural networks but how to recognize what they do and do not do, whom they serve, and what values are embedded in their design.
AI literacy is what
Cynthia Breazeal turned to after two decades of building social machines. Having demonstrated that people relate to responsive, expressive machines as social others—forming attachments, attributing feelings, adjusting their conduct to accommodate the machine’s apparent states—she understood that the most urgent intervention was not technical but educational: equipping people with the understanding they need to engage with AI without being misled by their own social instincts. The concept is broader than the merely technical. Knowing how a neural network works mechanically is a necessary but insufficient component; AI literacy in Breazeal’s demanding formulation includes the capacity to ask whether a given application is good for people, whom it serves, what it does to the humans who interact with it, and what values are embedded in the choices its designers made. This is not literacy as the acquisition of vocabulary. It is literacy as
sociological imagination applied to a specific domain: the capacity to see