The increasing use of AI in all areas of society is forcing schools to adapt their media literacy lessons to meet the challenges of the new technological age.
“It’s hard for the world of media literacy and education to keep up with the world of technology, especially AI development,” said Brian Baker, a consultant with Media Literacy Now and leader of the Oregon Media Literacy Coalition, a partnership of more than 40 national and state organizations supporting youth media and digital literacy.
This means schools need to catch up on media literacy so students can look more critically at online content. Developing skills to examine AI-generated content can help students protect themselves from misinformation and inaccurate content. or inappropriate online material..
For example, consider the role of AI in social media. This “enhances recommendations, powers messaging, shapes how you search, and enables the creation of AI-generated posts that fill your feed,” said Dr. Laura Erickson Schloss, chief medical officer at the JED Foundation, a nonprofit that supports mental health and suicide prevention in teens and young adults.
One of the big concerns for educators is that students struggle to differentiate between AI-generated content and non-AI-generated content. According to a nationally representative survey conducted by Edweek Research Center from February to March 2026, 61% of elementary school educators said their students had a “very” difficult time making that distinction. Fewer middle school (44%) and high school (38%) educators voted “quite a bit.”
Two factors could create a perfect storm that could make this problem even more difficult to resolve. 1. Media literacy is not necessarily a required course. 2. Advances in artificial intelligence are happening rapidly.
A report released earlier this year by Media Literacy Now found that at least half of U.S. states have enacted laws promoting media literacy education, and 11 states have passed new laws since January 2024.a non-profit organization.
Does social media promote “brain rot”?
Chelsea Olson, a researcher in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of the university’s Social Media and Adolescent Health research team, said her team is starting to consider how AI could become a part of social media and what that might mean for children.
Olson works with the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Center of Excellence on Social Media and Adolescent Mental Health, where people can ask questions and get evidence-based answers.. One of the questions posed by young people was about brain rot.which refers to someone consuming too much low-quality online content on social media. Some students see brain rot as ‘jokingly absurd’”, while others classify it as a “serious medical condition”.
The portal’s answers advise questioners to be on the lookout for signs of AI-generated content, as they are often associated with brain rot. “Helping teens recognize these markers and look for them when they’re seeing questionable or unfamiliar content is a start,” Olson said.
That’s why Baker argues that the problems both social media and AI are posing for students require integrated media and AI literacy education. AI opens the door for anyone to create fake photos, videos and misleading information, which could have a traumatic impact and lead to the breakdown of “democracy, social cohesion and civil discourse.”
In fact, Baker said there are two typical approaches to teaching students about the role of AI and how it works: a technical approach and a critical approach. The first covers the basics of AI literacy: how to use AI safely, ethically, and effectively. The second one goes a step further and teaches students to “observe and understand how AI influences individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.” [themselves] Baker added that this includes helping students address big-picture questions such as “How will AI impact the economy, the environment, civil discourse, our collective mental health, and our social-emotional health as a society?”
Still, some researchers suggest that there are currently no definitive best practices regarding the role of AI in media literacy, as technology is advancing too quickly to keep up. That’s why researchers like Justin Reich, associate professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recommend that educators take an experimental approach. When working with students, he said they should frame activities as a way to test how AI can be used in different capacities and how it affects people and outcomes when used in such ways.
“Your best path forward is to say, ‘Okay, what are the specific opportunities in front of us, and how can we do local experiments to test new ideas?'” Reich said.
What high school students need to know about AI
Kelly Guilfoyle, an English teacher and multilingual specialist at Lake Stevens High School in Washington, works on ethics and AI at the school. She provides single-term lessons to various classes where students discuss transparency, human involvement, and critical thinking regarding the use of AI.
She also created a three-pronged guideline for students:
- Always be clear and honest about how AI is used to complete tasks.
- Think critically about what the AI is specifically doing to help them.
- And when considering the use of AI, students should ask themselves, “Will my teacher do this for me?” If the answer is no, then AI should not be used to do the same.
AI “has sparked a new definition of creation, so that some students don’t understand that when they enter a prompt and get a result, that result was not created by them,” Guilfoyle said. In her classes, she emphasizes that when students use AI, it should begin with human prompting and end with human reflection.
While teaching this lesson, Guilfoil noticed a huge gap among his students when it came to using AI. “While there are students who use AI on a regular basis and perhaps think little about ethical considerations, almost half of the others consciously avoid AI due to ethical considerations,” she said.
In Wyoming, Jonathan Broersma, a fifth-grade teacher and assistant director of technology at Clearmont K-12 School, is starting to embrace critical thinking when it comes to AI.
His students only use AI for small activities, like getting feedback on an essay they’re writing or researching a topic. But Broersma encourages us to question the responses AI provides. “AI platforms allow us to get information much faster, but we want to be able to see where the information is coming from. [AI] “I got information from,” he said.
Some researchers argue that teaching AI literacy can be difficult if teachers themselves have not learned it through professional development..
Broersma has been working with teachers on this challenge. He said teachers recently took a closer look at the profile of Wyoming’s graduates and how it intersects with AI literacy.
A core competency of the Wyoming Profile is that graduates can identify and use trusted sources of information to build knowledge and make informed decisions. Although that core competency description does not explicitly mention AI, Broersma and some teachers discussed “the nuances of using AI when it is specifically deemed ‘trustworthy’ and when it requires additional scrutiny.”
“Our goal is not just to use AI for efficiency, but to use it as a tool to help students become better researchers and critical thinkers,” Broersma said.
