Teaching Critical AI Literacy through "Lab"-Based Learning

Today’s students are encountering AI everywhere, whether they realize it or not. As such, it is more imperative than ever to teach students how to be critical users of this emerging technology. In this presentation, I discuss the hands-on, experiential “lab” activities I developed to teach critical AI literacy to a group of first-year students in an interdisciplinary seminar. These activities used various browser-based, multimodal AI tools – from image generators to emotion detectors to voice interfaces – all of which have a low barrier to entry for non-expert students and instructors alike. By having students experiment with these AI tools in a scaffolded way, I suggest that we can help students better grasp how AI works, confront key dangers of AI like bias, and develop their own ethical consciousness about the role of AI in their lives.