AI Literacy Initiatives and the Circulation of Power
In February, the Department of Labor published a framework and a series of documents about addressing America’s urgent need for AI literacy. In March a number of corporate sponsors indicated their support for Our Pledge to America’s Youth on “Investing in AI Education.” They build on, and to some degree, improve the vision of AI Education announced in April of 2025, launched with an Executive Order, While these publications seem to send a message of unity, collaboration, and openness to help educators teach AI literacy, policy makers should build infrastructures that equip its citizens with a critical approach to generative artificial intelligence.
The National Artificial Intelligence Challenge continues a legacy of federal-level literacy campaigns that prepare young people to participate in a technology-assisted workforce. For example, in recent memory, the Obama administration launched its Computing for All Initiative in 2016, calling for millions of dollars in funding to support professional learning and K-12 education in computer science. Two decades before, the Clinton administration’s Technological Literacy Challenge took center stage, hoping that “all children are technologically literate by the dawn of the 21st century, equipped with the communication, math, science, reading, and critical thinking skills essential for a life-time of learning and the workplace of the 21st century.”
The Trump Administration echoes these two prior initiatives with its focus on training youth in AI literacy so they are prepared for the evolution (or “revolution”) in the workforce. The Department of Labor acknowledges there are many definitions for literacy but, as with its predecessors, they are primarily interested in “a foundational set of competencies that enable individuals to use and evaluate AI technologies responsibly, with a primary focus on generative AI, which is increasingly central to the modern workplace.” This present definition suggests there are a universal and neutral set of discrete skills; however, this language papers over a potential ideological agenda that benefits only a few people.
To explore beneath the surface of the common-sense language of AI literacy, we consider what research in literacy studies has revealed about education. For example, Brian Street argues that literacy is a sociocultural and situated practice created according to and used for ideological ends. In other words, learning reading and writing, and digital technologies in general, come with beliefs about who should learn literacy and to what ends; it can define who gets access to literacy and what opportunities they receive. Literacy itself can become a tool to serve those agendas. Critical literacy is an important practice for paying attention to how literacy initiatives can share or withhold the benefits of education from other communities.
Here we briefly untangle how power flows underneath the hood of the latest Trump administration’s AI literacy campaign.
Literacy sponsorship. By signing the administration’s pledge, companies like Oracle, Google, Intel, and Apple have made themselves literacy sponsors – “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way.” As Deb Brandt observes, sponsors determine the conditions of access, give incentives for compliance and loyalty, and determine what causes literate people are recruited for. Corporate sponsorships serve the government’s specific economic aims and national security goals, which may not serve public interests and certainly not promote public governance of AI.
Inequality of Access. Who gets access to literacy sponsorship and resources can be uneven. For example, Alpha School is one of the companies that signed the President’s AI pledge. They offer a one-week summer program in the Hamptons with a $4,500 price tag that is far out of the reach of most families.
Public Failure. Many of these sponsors present themselves as less costly alternatives to publicly funded systems and promote the idea that taxpayer investment in these efforts is doomed. For example, Magic School, Inc. promotes its AI service as a bargain for busy public school educators, although critics note that it does little to support the victims of bullying.
Emancipatory Literacies. Training a generation to become consumers of AI products actually isn’t empowerment. A recent study published in The Journal of Marketing showed that lower AI literacy correlated with a tendency to view AI as powerful and magical technologies.True emancipatory literacy is both critical and transformative, not just being able to use AI effectively. Transformative literacy is “genuine inclusion in technologies and the networks of power that help determine what they become, but never merely for the sake of inclusion.” Thus, we believe that students must engage in their rhetorical literacy practices; that is, become producers of such technology, critiquing how it works in the world, and helping shape policy in their schools. Although creating an LLM model seems to be in the hands of Big Tech, students can experiment with the very tools Big Tech provides, such as Google’s Gemini Gems, and use the experience to critique the so-called magic of AI.
Spectacles of progress. Photos of the First Lady at the Fostering the Future Together Summit entering with a humanoid robot on March 25 appear to be part of a larger narrative that undermines transparency and does little to promote the kind of substantive technological understanding that we need today. Reception to this media event often muddled key differences between robotics and machine learning, as well as between AGI (artificial general intelligence) and the much more limited predictive and generative AI systems in use today.
Remediation Narratives. Superficial forms of literacy sponsorship center the idea that literacy work is designed to “fix” individuals who have fallen behind. The classic example of this kind of approach is the 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read, a book that critiqued reading instruction in public schools and stocked a crisis that youth were illiterate. Illiteracy was not only a moral issue but also a danger to the United States in the Cold @ar with communist Russia. Although it may be desirable for First Lady Melania Trump to use her public profile to draw attention to the AI literacy issue, this position in the White House is often associated with the education of very young children as a group that is assumed to be immature, much like Laura Bush’s Ready to Read, Ready to Learn. Everyone needs AI literacy: students, faculty, administrators, parents, politicians, and even top officials in the Executive Branch. After all, when there are AI hallucinations in scientific reports from White House cabinet members, it indicates that authority figures also need AI literacy.
AI continues to attract big investments, and these investments ensure the United States economy avoids a recession. As such, AI literacy (and data centers) will be coming to a school near you. Key decision-makers on how AI education is rolled out, to whom, and for what purpose should come to the table with critical literacy questions for any initiatives, local or otherwise, that come from tech companies and their advocates.
Reader can consider the following questions as they refine their own thinking about GenAI literacies:
- How does the initiative construct teachers and students to justify the AI literacy campaign?
- Who is missing from the initiative in its planning and implementation?
- Whose interests does this initiative serve? Who will benefit the most from the campaign?
- Whose views are privileged and excluded?
- How are teachers and students positioned in relation to the creators of the initiative?
- What view of the world and values does the initiative assume that its audience holds? How do we know?