There has been a digital ton of stuff written about AI literacy in recent weeks and I have to confess I'm uncomfortable with most of it. To see what I mean, let's return to the base case: good old-fashioned literacy (GOFL). You know: reading and writing. Doug Belshaw's post here offers two points of comparison (I'm not singling him out, just using him as an example of a wider trend). First, he says, "imagine what (literacy) might look like for (adult) engineers and developers compared with children of primary school age." Well it would be the same thing, wouldn't it? And the child would simply be much less literate. Because the child and engineer are using the same language. Belshaw also says, "we included both safety and ethics because both are needed for using AI in a responsible and trustworthy way." Are safety and ethics part of GOFL? No - these are separate subjects. Including safety and literacy is just a way of sneaking (a particular set of) values into the definition of literacy.
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