User Empowerment through Media and Information Literacy Responses to the Evolution of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI)

Key messages
 

• Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI are having a significant impact on people’s engagement with information, digital technology, and media. This raises concerns about control human agency and autonomy over information, decision making, gender equality, and freedoms in general.
• User empowerment through Media and Information Literacy (MIL) as a response to GAI, which is still in its infancy, needs to be fully deployed and public policy makers should be concerned in developing it well from the outset.
• MIL is necessary to build people’s ethical use of synthetic media, i.e. video, text, image or voice content fully or partially generated by AI-systems.
• The societal opportunities being deepened by GAI include: access to information, participation, employability, creativity, lifelong learning and creative industries.
• The societal potential risks being deepened by GAI include:  disinformation, loss of data privacy, threats to integrity of elections, surveillance, lack of source reliability, discrimination, including gender-based and racial stereotypes, and copyrights violations.
• Building on familiarity in the face of urgency, AI literacy can be embedded in MIL to teach and train all sorts of communities (educators, librarians, youth workers, women networks, etc.).
• Ensuring explainable AI is key to both the design of MIL curricula and to the design of policy and governance around GAI.
• To build trust in information and education, source reliability needs to be revised to encompass the different types of “evidence” provided by GAI.
• MIL can train informed people from outside the technology industry to participate in the design, implementation and regulation of AI, in a manner that remains human-centered, gender-responsive and mindful of the public interest.
• Training for MIL is within the remit of governments and institutions of higher education, which have a duty to ensure MIL policy actions are sustained and strengthened over time, to be future-proof, in the face of an ever-evolving AI/GAI.