Exploring What People Need to Know to be AI Literate: Tailoring for a Diversity of AI Roles and Responsibilities

AI literacy research has had great success in offering competencies that capture the knowledge and skills users and developers of AI need to have for a world full of AI, helping them maximize its benefits and minimize its harms. However, recent years have witnessed other roles beyond users and developers whose responsibilities have been complicated by AI. In this work, we apply a service design approach to identify such roles and their responsibilities across various AI applications. By mapping the responsibilities to current AI literacy competencies, we exposed gaps suggesting unmet learning needs in current AI literacy research: identifying and assessing AI benefits, strategizing about AI’s benefits and risks, and monitoring and refining deployed AI to understand their changing impact. We discuss implications for future AI literacy research and its connection to Responsible AI research.