Critical AI Literacy for All: Teaching and Learning from Youth AI Audits

Youth today grow up immersed in AI technologies, interacting with them in classrooms, through social media, in gaming, and beyond. In this talk, I argue that K-12 computing education, which often focuses on teaching programming, must expand to prepare all young people to understand and critically evaluate the AI systems they encounter in daily life. I will describe one line of work my colleagues and I are pursuing to this end, developing AI auditing — a method used by experts to interrogate black-box AI systems — into a framework and accompanying educational materials appropriate for youth. Bidirectionally, AI auditing as AI literacy has much to offer K-12 education, and also offers insights for expert AI auditors. I will conclude by discussing promising future directions for this and other methods that connect professional CS practices with AI literacy education. 

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Danaé Metaxa is the Raj and Neera Singh Term Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science  at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. Their research interests focus on bias and representation in sociotechnical systems, and the effects of such systems on users in high-stakes social contexts like employment and politics. Dr. Metaxa received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, and their work has been published and awarded in top-tier publication venues including ACM CHI and CSCW. Dr. Metaxa has worked in an advisory role with legal, industry, and policy groups including  the NYC Commission on Human Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and PolicyLink. Dr. Metaxa also serves as Penn’s delegate to NIST’s AI Safety Institute Consortium, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety.