Artificial Intelligence Readiness: Education and Literacy Advancement

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[The content of the project was adjusted on 01.02.2024 as the student team changed].

In the era of digital transformation, artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI, is playing an increasingly important role in our everyday lives and in the world of work. The ability not only to use AI technologies, but also to understand and critically evaluate them, is increasingly becoming a crucial skill. Against this backdrop, the topic of AI literacy, i.e. education in the field of artificial intelligence, is becoming increasingly important. Even more specifically, generative AI literacy is the focus of our AIrise project, which aims to research and promote understanding and skills in dealing with generative AI systems.

The main goal of AIrise is to investigate and define the different aspects of AI literacy and generative AI literacy. These include:

1. Basic understanding of AI and generative AI: Research is being conducted into how deeply the basic knowledge of AI and generative AI in particular is anchored in different population groups and professional fields.
2. Ethics and social impact: Another area of investigation is to capture awareness and opinion on ethical aspects and the social impact of generative AI technologies.
3. Practical application skills: It will be evaluated which experiences people have had with generative AI tools so far and in which use cases and areas they use them and which skills are required for this.
4. Critical evaluation of AI outputs: In addition, an important part of the project involves critically considering how people reflect on, evaluate and question the results of AI systems.

AIrise is based on an extensive survey with quantitative and qualitative components in the fields of AI and generative AI as well as on grey literature in the form of practical case studies and the experience gained through AI-themed courses at the University of Hamburg.

The AIrise project aims to develop a deeper understanding of the importance and challenges of AI literacy and generative AI literacy. A societal endeavor should be to increase AI literacy in order to improve equal opportunities, foster innovation and make the full potential of the technology accessible to a wider range of users. For example, our findings can support the future development of curricula and training concepts, such as courses, workshops and similar formats.