Literacy in the Time of Artificial Intelligence

The latest mutation of Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, is more than anything a technology of writing. It is a machine that can write. In a world-historical frame, the significance of this cannot be understated. This is a technology in which the unnatural language of code tangles with the natural language of everyday life. Its form of writing, moreover, is multimodal, able not only to write text as conventionally understood, but also to “read” images by matching textual labels and to “write” images from textual prompts. Within the scope of this peculiarly mechanical manufacturing of writing are mathematics, actionable software procedure, and algorithm. This paper explores the consequences of Generative AI for literacy teaching and learning. In its first part, we speak theoretically and historically, suggesting that this development is perhaps as momentous for society and education as Pi Sheng's invention of moveable type and Gutenberg's printing press—and in its peculiar ways just as problematic. In the paper's second part, we go on to propose that literacy in the time of AI requires a new way to speak about itself, a revised “grammar” of sorts. In a third part, we discuss an experimental application we have developed that puts Generative AI to work in support of literacy and learning. We end with some findings and implications for literacy education and with a proposal for what we will call cyber-social literacy learning.