AI: A fortress wall?

By Alessandra Santoianni, Demokratiezentrum Wien

AI can be described as a fortress wall. As Ethan Mollick mentions in his book Co-intelligence: Living and working with AI, everything inside the fortress is what AI can do, everything outside is what AI cannot do.

We’ve reached a point where the boundaries of what AI can or cannot do are unclear. While some fields are being investigated, in civic education, we must experiment to discover the limits of this frontier.

“AI is transforming civic education by providing innovative tools and resources that enhance citizen engagement and democratic participation”.

This sentence was generated by ChatGPT¹. Would you have been able to recognise it if I had not stated it?

The ability to spot sentences, videos and images released by generative AI programmes (like ChatGPT or Dall-E2), or the fact that authors should disclose how they worked with AI, are only two issues re-defining digital literacy.

The way I would like to experiment with AI and enhance students’ digital literacy, as a researcher and a civic education lecturer, is by developing innovative didactical ideas and testing the many roles that AI can have. I often wonder: How are my students currently using generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT)? How can I best make use of AI potential, and what can AI do for me? What will AI be a substitute for in teaching and learning? Suppose AI can perform well in many of the tasks I assign to students. What will they eventually need to learn in terms of political literacy to better understand and engage with political systems, power dynamics, and civic responsibilities?

While I cannot fully answer all these questions (yet), I would like to give some pointers by presenting two Erasmus+ funded projects I am currently working on at the Demokratiezentrum Wien – Artificial Intelligence and the shaping of Democracy (AI.D), and Reflection of Extended Reality for a diversity-sensitive Higher Education (ReX).

The first project is intended for high school students and teachers, while the second is for higher education. Both focus on enhancing students’ knowledge and teachers’ professional development, which is crucial when understanding and using AI effectively. The goal of these projects is to amplify digital literacy and critical thinking among both students and teachers.

Our approach is focused on didactical experimentation via the development of a webinar series (in the AI.D project) and a digital handbook (in ReX) where we show the potential and limitations of AI resources. In doing this, we address issues that are already relevant in civic education, such as diversity and inclusion.

For example, in terms of inclusion, is generative AI accessible to all? How can students with learning, social or economic disadvantages use AI to their advantage when learning? When considering the role of democratic institutions, in what ways do they regulate AI? These are only some of the issues we discuss in our didactical material.

Using these resources, students and teachers will hopefully not only be able to identify AI’s boundaries but also play a role in shaping them.