February 9, 2026

As AI assumes a more visible role in everyday life, many workplaces and educators have rushed to embrace “AI literacy” as a means of professional development and workforce readiness. AI literacy, we hear, will prepare students, job seekers, and workers alike for a technology likely to revolutionize virtually every aspect of modern life. But the elephant in the room is that there is little agreement about what AI literacy actually means, let alone how it will practically help people struggling to learn, support themselves and their families, or prepare themselves for an increasingly uncertain future. 

The public deserves more than basic training on how to use AI. And increasingly, they’re demanding it. Americans can see how AI systems are shaping their access to opportunity, rights, and dignity, and they are asking pressing questions about how the technology affects everything from work to education to the environment. How are automated systems assessing job applications, and applicants themselves? Do AI tutors help students succeed or constrain real knowledge? Are the massive data centers constructed to power AI increasing communities’ utility bills? Mere “literacy” in AI is not enough to address these questions, and the many they raise in turn. Each one requires us to see the technology clearly, to critically examine the ways it is applied, and to draw on the tools of civic participation to steer its course.

Just as US civics equips people to understand their rights, responsibilities, and the workings of government, this work requires a curriculum. That is why we are launching a new AI Civics initiative at Data & Society: an approach to public education that treats AI not as a tool to be mastered, but as a domain of civic life where people have rights, responsibilities, and avenues for collective action. By surfacing civic tools the public can use to exert political power over AI systems and tech platforms — especially at the community level — AI Civics will build people’s capacity to have a voice in how these technologies are designed and deployed, and help to build democratic power over the institutions that create and promote them.

Across the country, workers are using collective bargaining to shape AI’s use in workplaces. Activists are exerting pressure on local permitting to exercise power over data center construction. Students and parents are calling for changes to school policy and procurement. This is civic participation in action: communities are using the levers available to them to shape whether and how AI and its infrastructures are rolled out. But first, they had to understand these civic processes and learn to wield them to their own advantage. AI Civics will facilitate and extend this learning, offering models and resources that communities across the country can draw on.

Answering an Overt Public Need

Across our research programs at Data & Society, we study technology’s impact on labor, health, climate, democracy, and communities. We have repeatedly heard research participants voice their uneasiness about AI and express a desire to act. In the fall of 2025, we partnered with the New York Public Library (NYPL) to host a widely-attended public event series called Understanding AI, during which we gathered a wide range of audience feedback. Three main points stood out:

• People are anxious about AI. From parents worried about kids using chatbots to do their homework, to workers nervous about AI impacting their job prospects, people are struggling to find their place in a rapidly shifting digital landscape. Survey data has repeatedly shown widespread apprehension about the extent to which this technology is poised to change people’s day-to-day lives and upend their futures. People feel caught off-guard by the speed and scale of this change, and frustrated by the sense that it is happening without their input.
• Even people using AI are concerned about its impacts. Audience members told us they use AI tools to deal with daily tasks, but are uneasy about the tradeoffs and hidden costs. They want to get beyond the glossy veneer of AI hype and understand the real implications of using these tools, their true costs and benefits, and how to mitigate harm.
• People are tired of being passive consumers and are looking for avenues to become more engaged civic actors. Many were eager to learn about tangible entry points for collective action, especially given the absence of government regulation and efforts to hold tech companies accountable. We heard a willingness to engage with complexity and a desire to resist narratives of technological inevitability.

Hearing from audiences at the New York Public Library underscored that many people are looking for ways to engage and take action in their own communities, building on their sense of mutual responsibility and collective imagination. AI Civics builds on what the public has told us, directly, that they need.

Where AI Literacy Falls Short

AI literacy, as currently constituted, does not meet these needs. Take for instance President Trump’s executive order on AI education, which emphasizes AI use and development: “To ensure the United States remains a global leader in this technological revolution, we must provide our Nation’s youth with opportunities to cultivate the skills and understanding necessary to use and create the next generation of AI technology.” Those who lack this literacy, the narrative goes, may be left behind. In a harsh economic climate, that is a threat most cannot afford to ignore.

In her new report, (404) Job Not Found: What Workforce Training Can’t Fix for Black Atlantans in the Age of AI, Data & Society researcher Anuli Akanegbu explores how AI is discussed in academic spaces, promoted by industry, implemented by government, and understood within civil society. Grounded in Atlanta, a city eager to brand itself as the epicenter of tomorrow’s AI-ready workforce, Akanegbu describes government and industry’s failure to clearly define AI literacy or specify the skills workers need in an increasingly AI-driven labor market as strategic abstraction, a form of intentional vagueness that turns career advancement into a constantly shifting target. This vagueness serves a purpose: it pushes the responsibility for joblessness onto a primarily Black workforce rather than addressing the structural conditions that make good jobs increasingly difficult to obtain. 

By framing AI adoption as a matter of individual effort rather than systemic limitations, the concept of AI literacy has been leveraged to market a simplistic solution to the very complex problem of job displacement. Much as “media literacy” placed the blame for disinformation, media manipulation, and a crumbling news ecosystem on individual social media users, “AI literacy” faults workers for failing to garner gainful employment rather than a wider socioeconomic environment that normalizes precarity. An AI Civics approach will instead begin with workers, students, or residents to build and diffuse community knowledge over how to help residents further exercise their collective power.

Our AI Civics Initiative

It’s time to expand “AI readiness” education to include civic participation — and we want you to join us. Through 2029, we are seeking organizations who are interested in partnering with us to create civics curricula that meet the needs of constituents in a specific place and setting, and who will work with us to build and mobilize these community resources toward greater civic capacity. For example, we hope to work with library systems to create resources for patrons on local government AI use, or with parent and student groups on school district policies and how to support procurement and policy change — and then to work with our partners to launch and amplify these pathways toward greater local determination over AI and its infrastructures. Each resource we create with anchor partners will also be released in the broader suite of AI Civics materials for others to use, and will be available online via Creative Commons. Together, our train-the-trainer workshops and free online webinars will complement AI literacy framings in skillbuilding programs, and build toward a national civic conversation shaping the trajectory of AI. If you’re interested in collaborating, get in touch at [email protected].

The risks and harms presented by AI are well-documented, but they are not inevitable. Our critical task today is to build democratic power over the institutions designing and deploying AI systems. It is time for public accountability and public interest priorities to return to the center of large-scale technical infrastructural innovation. It is time for the broader public to exert more democratic control over AI. It is time for AI Civics.

Illustration: Jamillah Knowles & We and AI / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/