Presented at LILAC 2024.

1. Teaching Critical AI Literacies
Maha Bali, PhD. American University in Cairo
@bali_maha
LILAC Conference
26th March, 2024
1

2. How are you
feeling?
(M)

3. Level of
Expertise on AI
(M)

4. Slides:
https://bit.ly/LILACbali

5. “AI cannot be considered inevitable, beneficial or transformative in
any straightforward way. You do not even need to take a strongly
normative perspective either way to see that AI in education is
highly contested and controversial. It is, in other words, a public
problem that requires public deliberation and ongoing oversight if
any possible benefits are to be realized and its substantial risks
addressed.” - Ben Williamson (emphasis mine)

6. The plan for today…
● Include your perspectives
● Show where I’m coming from
● Metaphors as an approach to critical AI literacy
● Suggest a framework for critical AI literacies
● Resources for critical AI Literacy
● Hear from you again

7. How do you
feel about the
latest
advances in
AI? (M)

8. Screenshot from
BeMyAI

9. By “Critical” I
mean…

10. “[S]eeing AI not as a neutral technology
but as political technology that can be
used to serve particular policy objectives
and ideologies.”
- Ben Williamson, The Social Life of AI

11. Social Justice
oriented

12. To take a critical
approach to AI,
I’ll mainly focus
on critical AI
literacy

13. Critical AI
Literacy is
Contextual:
Learners
Teachers
Location
What else?

14. “The heart is centered slightly to the left of our
bodies. Two sacred languages of Arabic and
Hebrew are written from right to left, toward the
heart, which, as some have noted, mirrors the
purpose of writing, namely to affect the
heart.”
- Hamza Yusuf, Purification of the Heart
(emphasis added)

15. “Intentional
adaptation”
- adrienne maree
brown

16. What is a
metaphor for
AI you would
use?
(M)

17. Assistant, Parrot, or Colonizing
Loudspeaker? ChatGPT Metaphors for
Developing Critical AI Literacies
(Gupta, Atef, Mills & Bali, 2024)
https://openpraxis.org/articles/10.5598
2/openpraxis.16.1.631

18. Questions in Gupta et al (2024)
1. What feelings does the metaphor evoke?
2. Where does it help us understand AI?
3. What kind of perspective does it push the listener to imagine about AI?
4. Where is the metaphor helpful and harmful?
5. Is it a generally positive or negative view of AI?
6. In what ways does the metaphor showcase accessibility or equity issues
related to AI?
7. How does the metaphor portray the relationship between humans and AI?

19. Let’s try
analyzing
some
metaphors
(M)

20. Two key dimensions that metaphors
inform our understanding of AI (Gupta
et al, 2024)
1. Anthropomorphizing or not?
2. Selber’s multiliteracies framework: functional, critical
and rhetorical
Selber, S. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age. Southern Illinois University Press.

21. Gupta et al,
2024) -
data
redacted

22. How is AI not like a calculator?

23. How AI not like Wikipedia?

24. Gupta et al,
2024) -
some data
included
Helper
Fahlawi
Two-edged
sword
Stochastic
parrot
Fast food
Plastic surgery
Colonizing
loudspeaker
Calculator
Auto-complete
Assistant
Genie
Magician

25. Cake as a metaphor
for AI
When would you
make it from
scratch, from box,
bakery or grocery?

26. “In this world, the 'basic building blocks' of
life are relationships, not individuals… We
are all 'bundles of potential' …
Relationships evoke these potentials. We
change as we meet different people or are
in different circumstances.”
- Margaret Wheatley

27. Ethics and AI
"The AI that we have here and now? It’s racist. And ableist. And
sexist. And riddled with assumptions. And that includes large
language models like the one #ChatGPT is built on"
~ Brenna Clarke Gray
See Torrey Trust’s curated slides

28. On the importance of critical AI literacy
From Bali, M. (2024). Where are the
crescents in AI? LSE HE blog.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/highereducation/20
24/02/26/where-are-the-crescents-in-ai

29. aipedagogy.org
Live demo!

30. How to use AIPP to develop critical AI literacy https://aipedagogy.org/
Dimension of critical AI literacy AIPP Resource to use
How generative AI works AI Starter & LLM Tutorial
Awareness of inequalities and biases Critical analysis across AI tools and
stereotypes
Ethical issues Debating the ethics of generative AI or
Close reading of ToS
Appropriate use AI Sandwich
A tale of two critiques
(Cake analogy)
Prompt engineering Resources (external links)→ Prompting

31. Beyond ChatGPT (1/3)
Other generative AI tools
● Gemini (used to be Bard) from Google
● Bing AI (text and image generation)
● You.com - access to multiple functionalities
● Poe.com - access to multiple GPTs
● More… https://chat.openai.com/gpts

32. Mohamed
Ali
story

33. Beyond ChatGPT (2/3)
● Typeset.io - helps you understand and ask questions
about an article
● Debate.ai - conduct a debate with AI’s help
● For literature search
○ https://keenious.com/
○ https://www.researchrabbit.ai/ (better at medicine)
○ https://elicit.org/ (weird choices!)
● Creates questions for slides https://www.classpoint.io/

35. It’s not bad, but it’s not really better than
Google scholar search, so… meh

36. Beyond ChatGPT (3/3)
goblin.tools
● Magic To Do - breaks down complex tasks/assignments
into smaller steps
● Formalizer - changes the tone of a piece of writing
● Judge - evaluates the tone of a piece of writing to tell you if
you're misinterpreting it
● Estimator - estimates how long a task/assignment will take

37. How
(Gen)AI
works

38. Playing
Quickdraw.
See Autodraw

39. Online Tutorials,
e.g. AI Pedagogy
Project LLM tutorial
https://aipedagogy.org/

40. https://aipedagogy.org/guide/tutorial/

41. Recognizing
inequity in AI
globally

42. Not only are these AI technologies being initially
trained on data-sets that reflect historical biases and
discriminations against Black populations, but they are
then being deployed in institutions and settings that
are structurally racist. All of this results in what Ruha
Benjamin (2019) terms ‘engineered inequality’ – i.e. the
tendency for AI technologies to result in inevitably
oppressive and disadvantaging outcomes “given their
design in a society structured by interlocking forms of
domination” (Benjamin 2019, p.47). - Selwyn

43. “As someone from the Global South, I
would like to know who has a say in
determining what becomes a part of the
corpus that feeds the output.”
Owusu-Ansah, 2023

44. “As scholar-activists such as Ashley Shew argue, there
is a distinct air of ‘techno-ablism’ to the ways in which
AI is currently being developed. Features such as eye-
tracking, voice recognition and gait analysis all work
against people who do not conform to expected
physical features and/or ways of thinking and acting.”
- Selwyn

45. 1. Biased data sets (e.g. mostly white, western, English
content)
2. Inaccessible in some locations (e.g. ChatGPT not initially
available in Egypt and other countries)
3. Reproduces some oppressions (historically with facial
recognition, criminal justice AI, search engines)
4. Extractive (learns from users, takes data without
permission)
Inequalities we know of in AI

46. ”...according to a new paper from Stanford scholars,
there’s just one (very big) problem: The detectors are
not particularly reliable. Worse yet, they are especially
unreliable when the real author (a human) is not a native
English speaker.” - Myers

47. Ethics in
the
processes
of creating
AI?

48. Ethical concerns include…
1. Exploitation of human labor
2. Intellectual property rights violations
3. Harm to the environment
4. Other?
Leon Furze - Teaching AI Ethics series:
https://leonfurze.com/ai-ethics/

49. "We trained our learners to write like robots, following patterns
and scripts and worrying less about content than the fact that it
looks vaguely like an essay. And shockingly, robots are also good
at writing like robots" - Brenna Clarke Gray

50. When, where,
why to use
AI…

51. What is
GenAI good
for?
(M)

52. What is
GenAI bad
for?
(M)

53. Is “safety” over credibility
the only concern?
By Aleksandr Tiulkanov. Source: ChatGPT-and-
Artificial-Intelligence-in-higher-education-Quick-Start-
guide_EN_FINAL.pdf (unesco.org) p. 6

54. Comparison of Information Retrieval
Systems: Why we should not use Gen AI for
this
From p.7 of Shah & Bender (preprint).
Envisioning Information Access
Systems: What Makes for Good Tools
and a Healthy Web?.
https://faculty.washington.edu/ebende
r/papers/Envisioning_IAS_preprint.pdf

55. Prescriptive vs opportunistic use of AI

56. Flags - there is only one correct answer but AI
doesn't always know it!

57. I wondered if Stable Diffusion is just
bad at flags and I tried some.
Egyptian flag
American flag
Kuwaiti flag
Great Britain flag
Palestinian flag

58. Dog carrying a newspaper - might not
exist, so AI can make it
Image of dog running hiding
A newspaper from DALLE
via pie.com

59. Images of various classrooms - AI can do that
if we do not need real people in the pictures

60. Teacher trying to
control a disruptive
classroom with
diverse students -
generate via DALLE
from poe.com

61. A note about “botshit” and AI detectors

62. Image from https://xkcd.com/1838/

63. Paper and authors
Hannigan, T., McCarthy I.P. and Spicer, A.
(2024) Beware of Botshit: How to Manage
the Epistemic Risks of Generative Chatbots.
In Business Horizons.
Ian P. McCarthy
Tim Hannigan
Andre Spicer

64. Bullshit, hallucinations
and botshit
Botshit: Chatbot-generated content that is not grounded
in truth (i.e., hallucinations) and is then uncritically used
by a human for communication and decision-making
tasks (Hannigan et al. 2024).

65. A typology
of chatbot
work
modes
Hannigan, T., McCarthy I.P. and Spicer, A. (2024) Beware of Botshit: How to
Manage the Epistemic Risks of Generative Chatbots. In Business Horizons.

66. What do we
do as
educators?

67. On encouraging
transparency
What if we create a culture
of “transparent
assessment”?

68. On encouraging transparency
Sarah Elaine Eaton on a possible postplagiarism era:
"Trying to determine where the human ends and where the
artificial intelligence begins is pointless and futile."
"Historical definitions of plagiarism will not be rewritten because
of artificial intelligence; they will be transcended. Policy
definitions can – and must – adapt."
https://drsaraheaton.wordpress.com/2023/02/25/6-tenets-of-postplagiarism-writing-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/

69. On using “games” to explain AI
● QuickDraw: QuickDraw
● Real or Fake (text): https://roft.io
● Real or Fake (photos): Which Face is Real

70. On the automation of care
https://blog.mahabali.
me/educational-
technology-2/on-the-
automation-of-care/

71. Inspiration for assignments to promote Critical
AI Literacy
● AI Pedagogy Project Assignments: https://aipedagogy.org/assignments
● Exploring AI Pedagogy: https://exploringaipedagogy.hcommons.org/
● 101 Creative Uses for AI in Education:
https://zenodo.org/records/8072950
● LearnwithAI Toolkit: https://umaine.edu/learnwithai/
● TextGenEd: https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/collections/textgened/

72. Speculative Futures/Fiction Approach
Invite your students to read this
article by Bozkurt et al (2023) -
many authors from around the
world, reflect, then write their
own (about their field?)

73. What is a key
takeaway for
you? (M)

74. 74
Thank You
@bali_maha
Slides: https://bit.ly/LILACbali
bali@aucegypt.edu

75. Presentation design
This presentation uses the following typographies:
● Titles: Damion
● Body copy: Inria Sans
Download for free at:
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Damion
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inria+Sans
You don’t need to keep this slide in your presentation. It’s only here to serve you as a design guide if you need to create new slides or
download the fonts to edit the presentation in PowerPoint®
75

76. Free templates for all your presentation needs
Ready to use,
professional and
customizable
100% free for personal
or commercial use
Blow your audience
away with attractive
visuals
For PowerPoint and
Google Slides