Mapping AI Literacy Frameworks: An Analysis of the Evolving Metaphorical Relationships between Students, Teachers, and AI

Rich metaphors abound within the growing AI literacy research landscape, and there is no better place to look for them than within the rapidly proliferating number of AI literacy frameworks. Conceptual metaphors and AI literacy frameworks, which outline the skills, competencies, and dispositions needed to engage critically with AI, complement each other by organizing people’s perceptions of this complex technological change and coordinating our actions in response. Through idiographic metaphor analysis, we coded the metaphors in eighteen AI literacy frameworks to uncover the underlying metaphorical relationships between AI, students, and teachers. We highlight the dominant metaphors for each actor: AI-as-tool-transformer-ubiquitary-artefact-threat; student-as-analyst-citizen-creator; and teacher-as-designer-guide. We then discuss the connections between these metaphors and their alignment with dominant educational paradigms. Finally, we discuss three tensions within the metaphors that address blind spots within the current corpus of AI literacy frameworks. We suggest areas for future research that address these tensions and consider our individual and collective capacity in higher education to shape or reject an AI-saturated future.