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OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Back Bill To Fund 'AI Literacy' In Schools (404media.co) 82

Posted by BeauHD from the no-child-left-unprompted dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A new, bipartisan bill introduced (PDF) by Democratic Senator of California Adam Schiff and endorsed by the biggest AI developers in the world -- including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft -- would change the K-12 curriculum to shoehorn in "AI literacy," something that young people and teachers alike already hate in schools. The Literacy in Future Technologies Artificial Intelligence, or LIFT AI Act, would empower the new director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to make grant awards "on a merit-reviewed, competitive basis to institutions of higher education or nonprofit organizations (or a consortium thereof) to support research activities to develop educational curricula, instructional material, teacher professional development, and evaluation methods for AI literacy at the K-12 level," the bill says.

It defines AI literacy as using AI; specifically, "having the age-appropriate knowledge and ability to use artificial intelligence effectively, to critically interpret outputs, to solve problems in an AI-enabled world, and to mitigate potential risks." The bill is endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers, Google, OpenAI, Information Technology Industry Council, Software & Information Industry Association, Microsoft, and HP Inc. [...] The grant would support "AI literacy evaluation tools and resources for educators assessing proficiency in AI literacy," according to the bill. It would also fund "professional development courses and experiences in AI literacy," and the development of "hands-on learning tools to assist in developing and improving AI literacy." Most importantly for real-world implications, it would fund changing the existing curriculum "to incorporate AI literacy where appropriate, including responsible use of AI in learning."

OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Back Bill To Fund 'AI Literacy' In Schools More | Reply

OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Back Bill To Fund 'AI Literacy' In Schools

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  • Use our products! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Monday May 04, 2026 @06:03PM (#66127810)
    "Indoctrinate, indoctrinate, indoctrinate!" - Tech Company CEO's

    • Re:Use our products! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday May 04, 2026 @06:47PM (#66127854)
      It beats the hell out of teaching critical thinking.

      You don't want your kid coming home changing deeply held religious or political beliefs right?

      This is why it's important that parents can pull their kids out of any class they object to. This way flat earther children don't have to be subjected to non-Zetetic Astronomy...
    • I actually have no problem with this. Just have the bill require each director level and above, and the board of the directors, from each company providing Artificial Intelligence services, to teach one full week during summer school. Thinking about it, I bet some companies might actually step up for that.

      I'll even let them miss up to four hours if they're physically injured with the skin being broken. They'll have to make it up later, of course.

      • I actually have no problem with this. Just have the bill require each director level and above, and the board of the directors, from each company providing Artificial Intelligence services, to teach one full week during summer school.

        I would vote for this. I don't even demand that the directors teach at the school. Working as a cleaner in a busy public school would be acceptable too.

      • Scam Slopman, Elona and Satya can only teach kids how to scam people.

        While a useful skill, it is hardly "AI literacy".

    • WTF is "age appropriate"? I was dabbling in Transformers when I was 3.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by quall ( 1441799 )

      Do you think that children who haven't worked or used it will be at a disadvantage? Do you think AI is going away? Keep in mind that employers are already relying it for job use. There used to be classes on how to type or use word processor apps and nobody seemed to complain then.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by havana9 ( 101033 )
      Yes I think that tech compnies CEO especially those involved in AI are like Daleks with less empathy.

  • Start with regular literacy, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MIPSPro ( 10156657 ) on Monday May 04, 2026 @06:09PM (#66127818)
    21% of US adults are illiterate. 56% read below a 6th grade level. 2/3 of 4th/8th graders not proficient in reading; recent declines post-2019/2022. We don't need smartphones and AI in schools at all. What they need is to go back to chalkboards, physical textbooks, and homework. The only thing that needs tweaking is to add AI detection and resistance to their assignments (ie.. do more in class, in person). Schools that do this get consistently better results [arno.uvt.nl] than the ones that focus on technology.
    • Melania's on board [youtu.be].
      • That's funny, because so is Ron Paul [ronpaulcurriculum.com]. You'd think something so important as educating kids would be a top priority but it seems in reality, preserving benefits for retirees, like 20-year retirement plans, from public schools is much more important. That's what we actually do while achievement scores continue to degrade. So, that's what our leaders actually value.

    • Re:Start with regular literacy, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sit1963nz ( 934837 ) on Monday May 04, 2026 @07:37PM (#66127938)
      Trump loves the uneducated....
      • Especially the young ones who don't bite his pecker.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by quall ( 1441799 )

        Why, are schools getting rid of the other classes?

        K-12 education has already lowered the bar to point where students can barely read or perform basic math, yet you post as if children aren't already uneducated when graduating.

        Who will be at a greater disadvantage in 15 years; the ones who know how to use AI tools or the ones who don't?

    • Is this different from, say, 50 years ago? or 80? Or 30?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hasaf ( 3744357 )
        When people start talking about "The good ol' days" my mind jumps to a bible verse (Luke 22:36) where the god/prophet/teacher Jesus/Isa (pbuh) laments that times are not as they once were.

        So, if over 2,000 years ago Jesus/Isa (pbuh) laments these "The good ol' days,"... When, exactly, were these "The good ol' days"?
        • What? No it doesn't, it says, " Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one."

          Why? Because when he had sent them out to preach 2x2, he told them to take nothing. Not lamenting that things were so much better a few months (a year maybe) back, but that they were different situations.

          • Does it matter what countless different versions of an old, fictional book put together by a committee says?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Hasaf ( 3744357 )
            That's interesting; I remember the verse very differently. It seems that I was having a Mandela Effect moment.
            • Well, that's perfectly normal!
              Honestly, it was just fresh in my mind from watching that episode of The Chosen the other day.
      • Yes, it is. Since the advent of mass schooling high school students academic performance peaked in the 1980's and early 1990's. [the74million.org] Another problem is that the poorest kids [the74million.org] are the ones who show the biggest decline in the last 30 years. You see, when the chips are down, the folks who work in public schools decide to reward themselves (pensions, pay raises, shorter terms, unfair property tax hikes) and the kids and neighbors be-damned. We definitely saw this when they punked the kids [dfipolicy.org] during CV19, bitched out, an
        • And in the 90's there was a wave of "great new ideas" for education. Ebonics will help educate the poor, obviously. Girls are being ignored, so let's stop giving the boys so much attention. It's really more important that they feel good, so let's not hold them back for failing, or fail them at all. In fact, just give everyone a trophy for being themselves. Phonics is such an old idea, teaching the whole word is a new one, so that's what we should do. The way we teach math could be better, so we should
        • I was in high school during said peak. It was shit. I left early. What I see now is better in some ways and worse in others. The people who truly know how to educate kids are in the classrooms being told what to do by people who don't know how to educate kids but do know how to twist schools into generating measurable results.

  • Just great (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday May 04, 2026 @06:12PM (#66127824)

    ... Fund 'AI Literacy' In Schools.

    "Learn to Code" becomes "Learn to Prompt" /s

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hodr ( 219920 )

      Why the /s? Have you seen any new "learn to code" initiatives in the last couple years?

  • As Satya Nudella often said: Stop calling it slop or even Microslop. You have to learn that AI is an important tool on your ladder down.

  • As stupid does.

  • A Positive Slant (Score:4, Interesting)

    by iamhigh ( 1252742 ) on Monday May 04, 2026 @06:37PM (#66127838)
    Kids need to be ready for the world they are going to enter, and it is going to contain AI. In the late 90's we taught kids about computers, the internet, and programming. At the time there were many jobs that didn't use a computer daily or at all, including in the office. That was very good instruction and prepared me for what I was going to work on when I hit the workforce in about 5 years.

    If they are just adding instruction on what AI is, how to utilize AI, including that it isn't always correct and that we need to be careful with the implementation, then I see no reason schools shouldn't cover this topic.

    I even think middle schoolers should be taught about social media. They could use /. to illustrate many important points.

    The devil is always in the details. I haven't read the bill or TFA.
    • I came here to say the same thing. LLMs are not going away, and are almost as ubiquitous as search sites. Kids should know what they are getting into.

      We can be skeptical about the involvement and motivations of the tech companies, but it's better to have the schools have some say in the messaging about this stuff.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      At least they'll be ready to laugh, in a knowing way, at all the AI hype. And then cry at the huge power bills and general waste of money on all those useless "data centres".

    • A lot of business happens over drinks. Thus, children should start building their liquor tolerance while still bottle fed, so they can be on the bottle their whole lives. This message has been brought to you by AA and the Liquor Advisory Board.

    • Kids need to be ready for the world they are going to enter, and it is going to contain AI. In the late 90's we taught kids about computers, the internet, and programming.

      Yeah, that's why the average member of the public has such great coding skills. And they are great at saving their work, and making backups, and adding attachments to emails, and and and....

      • Re:A Positive Slant (Score:4, Insightful)

        by dostert ( 761476 ) on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @08:11AM (#66128450)

        Kids need to be ready for the world they are going to enter, and it is going to contain AI. In the late 90's we taught kids about computers, the internet, and programming.

        Yeah, that's why the average member of the public has such great coding skills. And they are great at saving their work, and making backups, and adding attachments to emails, and and and....

        Same thing I came to say. We stopped teaching about computers, the internet and programming to everyone because we started to assume "they grew up with computers, so they know how to use them". It has created an entire generation that can play mobile games all day but have absolutely no idea where anything is actually stored on any of their devices. When you say "Go to File->Save" they have no idea what you're talking about. How about instead of teaching the intricacies of interpreting AI output, we make sure they have basic tech skills?

    • Re:A Positive Slant (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @08:11AM (#66128452)

      In the 90s, the school systems were kind of left to fend for themselves. The vast majority of the computers in my schools were systems the area companies were scrapping, but donated them on the way out. A decent part of my programming class was trying to salvage 20 out of 24 systems that a business donated that wouldn't boot. They spent what budget they could on a handful of computers capable of running encarta for the library.

      In the 2000s, things started shifting a bit, in a college course we were handed out 'donated' copies of Visual Studio, but the teacher said that's for us but wasn't going to be used for class at all.

      Since 2010, things have gotten a bit worrisome as a lot of the big tech have started getting awfully opinionated and wanting to 'help' kids learn to code. Education is all well and good, but when the big corporate interests get actively involved and prescriptive, things drift toward indoctrination more than education.

      At least with the 'learn to code', a skill that needed significant develop was being theoretically served, though a lot to be worried about there, with the LLM scenario, it's pretty much just indoctrination. To the extent an LLM works or does not work is not something that takes a significant amount of time to sort out.

      As an example, my kid was asked to write a brief thing on what excitingly awesome thing they are looking forward to using AI to do as part of an "AI challenge" at school sponsored by a local tech company. Not to take a critical assessment of things, of evaluating the nuance of benefits and drawbacks, nothing on helping them understand how to best use it, just to blatantly write a puff piece about how awesome AI is/would be for something. Basically soliciting marketing fodder and awarding three kids a couple hundred bucks. It was going to be a grade and so they had to do it and take it seriously..

      • How old was your kid? If they weren't in the latter years of high school, all of this would have been a pointless waste of time from a developmental standpoint - "to take a critical assessment of things, of evaluating the nuance of benefits and drawbacks, nothing on helping them understand how to best use it,"

        And even if your kid was a senior, that'd still be later in the syllabus.

        I'm not saying the project wasn't BS, I have no thoughts on that. What I'm saying is that you're complaining about how yo

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          I said that because it was consistent with the general classwork that was expected of them from the history and english classes. Having to do write ups of this sort of nuance, but then carving out some 'yay AI' fluff in the middle seemed just wholly stupid.

  • Tell Schiff What You Think (Score:4, Insightful)

    by machineghost ( 622031 ) on Monday May 04, 2026 @06:53PM (#66127858)

    If you live in California, please take a moment (as I just did) to tell Schiff exactly what you think of him selling out the nation's children in exchange for more $$$ from OpenAI. He may be (ok, no "may") a corrupt politician ... but he still cares what his constituents think of him.

  • Current AIs are not truly intelligent. They encode training data as tokens embedded in a high-dimensional vector space. The positions of these embeddings, together with learned weights in the attention mechanisms, capture statistical associations and contextual dependencies between tokens.

    Combined with user input, these patterns generate new tokens that are decoded into text. Consequently, their accuracy is fundamentally limited by the quality and content of their training data, which consists largely of

  • I'd bet a small wager that all the education and skills training required to become a really good prompt engineer that can instruct non-sapient AI into doing the algorithmic functions and tasks that leads to success and profitable outcomes are the same ones that comprise a well rounded (although not deep or specialized) education in the arts, sciences, language, logic, reasoning, research, and all the other traits of a 'Renaissance Man'.

    We could very well see the AI education pipeline eventually start spitt

  • ClippyAI: The LIFT AI Act, championed by Senators Schiff and Rounds, isn't about giving Big Tech a foothold in our schools; it’s about equity. Students in affluent districts are already using agentic AI to tutor themselves and manage their workloads.

    Without federal funding for a standardized AI literacy curriculum, students in underfunded districts will be left behind, entering a workforce where "AI-native" is a prerequisite for entry-level roles.

    We aren't just teaching them to use tools by teac

    • Students in affluent districts are already using agentic AI to tutor themselves and manage their workloads.

      Hahahahaha!

  • changing too fast (Score:3)

    by spaceman375 ( 780812 ) on Monday May 04, 2026 @08:49PM (#66128040)

    They want this in k-12 grades? The AI landscape is changing so fast anything we teach those kids will be obsolete by the time they enter the workforce. Sure, teach them about it as part of proper STEM education, plus language skills, music, and athletic activities, but don't waste too much time on the nuances of dealing with an LLM. In many cases the kids will know more than the teachers anyway.

    • Don't avoid it but make it a high-school elective or something. It absolutely should not take time away from any other instruction, and absolutely shouldn't be K-12. 8-12 maybe. 11-12, fine.

  • ..."Everyone should learn to code" courses, and NOW do a 180 to AI. If teachers are going "WTF" I fully concur with their WTFage.

  • Fuck the techbros (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sinkskinkshrieks ( 6952954 ) on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @12:53AM (#66128218)
    First, we need history, English, math, and critical thinking skills literacy before AI claptrap.

  • Only if it's balanced. (Score:3)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @08:53AM (#66128476)

    Don't just let the tech companies decide the curriculum for these courses, or it truly will be indoctrination. Teach the positives, the negatives, and give a balanced view of where we are and where various leaders inside and outside of tech hope things can go. If we allow the tech companies to develop the curriculum without oversight, it will be like going to AI church, the continually preaching of the coming AI God will add to the layer of doom hanging over kids' heads as they stare at a future that won't need them because AI and robotics will do all the work.

    • No, no "balanced view", that's too subjective, too broad, and not at all what they might need to learn. We aren't trying to educate them on high level policy, they're kids.
      Focus on its practical use and make it a high-school elective so nobody bothers to try and dick with it, and the more valuable class time isn't wasted on it.

  • Are they teaching LLM use in the abstract, or are they teaching how to purchase specific products? Literacy skills still work no matter who publishes the book; does Claude prompting work *reliably* for ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Llama, ... all others? Will Claude prompting work the same a year from now?

    I hated it when I saw credit courses for "How to use Adobe Photoshop" in college, but at least those courses weren't mandatory.

    • When I was growing up, computer classes were elective and focused on practical matters. How do you use a word processor (which was as outdated as the computers), how do you deal with files, what are the parts called... that sort of thing.

  • ... not GenZ and GenA

    From my experience with my Gen A daughter, they are VERY well versed on distinguishing AI from non-AI.

    It is the older cohorts who are being deceived.

    • I am pretty sure the kids in school know how to use AI. It is how they do their homework, write their papers, etc. Teaching them AI basics is redundant. Teaching them advanced AI use is pointless -by the time they enter the workforce, the state-of-the-art will have changed several times.

      What they need to learn about AI is that it is not a replacement for skill or knowledge. It is a tool. A supplement. They need to be taught when to use it, and when to rely on themselves instead. (like a calculator for

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        AI Literacy is not how to input "Solve my homework" but knowing that AI may solve the homework different than you. And in the extended meaning also knowing that never doing homework by yourself may lead to you finally having something to do without AI that you are not prepared for. For example the next exam.

  • We know it won't be the big AI companies. Oh right, it's the taxpayer - maybe start actually teaching basic fundamentals again before wasting money on something anyone taught basic thinking skills can figure out in a few uses without a stupid class detracting school time from learning fundamentals.

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