The rising use of AI in all sectors of society is forcing schools to adjust their media literacy lessons to meet the challenges of a new technological era.
“It is difficult for the media literacy, education world to keep up with the world of technology and specifically AI development,” said Brian Baker, a consultant for Media Literacy Now and leader of the Oregon Media Literacy Coalition, a partnership of over 40 national and state organizations supporting youth media and digital literacy.
That means schools will have to play a game of media literacy catch-up to help their students put a more critical eye on online content. Building the skills to examine AI-generated content will help students protect themselves from being misled or harmed by inaccurate or inappropriate online material.
Consider, for instance, the role of AI in social media. It is “powering recommendations, driving messaging, shaping the way we search, and enabling the creation of AI-generated posts that fill our feeds,” said Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth, the chief medical officer for the JED Foundation, a nonprofit that supports emotional health and suicide prevention for teens and young adults.
One of the big concerns for educators is that students are struggling to distinguish AI-generated content from non-AI-generated content. Sixty-one percent of elementary school educators said their students struggled “a lot” in making that distinction, according to a nationally representative survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center in February through March of 2026. Fewer educators in middle school (44%) and high school (38%) voted for “a lot.”
Two factors are generating a perfect storm that could make this problem even harder to solve: 1. Media literacy isn’t always a required course. 2. Advances in artificial intelligence are happening at a rapid pace.
At least half of U.S. states have enacted laws to advance media literacy education, with 11 passing new legislation since January 2024, according to a report published earlier this year by Media Literacy Now, a nonprofit organization.
Does social media fuel ‘brain rot’?
Chelsea Olson, a research scientist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s pediatrics department and a member of the university’s Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team, said her team is starting to examine how AI will be a part of social media and what that means for kids.
Olson works on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health Q&A portal, in which people can ask questions and get evidence-based responses. One of the questions that was submitted by a young person was about brain rot, which is when someone consumes excessive amounts of low-quality online content on social media. Some students see brain rot as “playful and absurd,” while others have labeled it a “serious medical condition.”
The portal’s response recommended the questioner be on the lookout for signs of AI-generated content because that is often linked to brain rot. “Helping teens recognize those markers and looking for them if they’re seeing content that is questionable or that they’re not sure about” is a start, said Olson.
That is why Baker makes the argument that the problems social media and AI together are posing for students require media and AI literacy to be taught in an integrated fashion. AI has opened the doors for anybody to create fake photos and videos and misleading information that can have traumatizing effects and lead to a breakdown in “democracy, social cohesion, and civic discourse.”
As it is, Baker said there are two typical approaches for teaching students about the role of AI and how it works—a technical approach and a critical one. The first covers the basics of AI literacy—how to use it safely, ethically, and effectively. The second takes it a step further, teaching students to “observe and understand how AI is impacting the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals, both [themselves] as well as peers,” said Baker. He added that it also includes helping students address big-picture questions, such as “what is the impact of AI on the economy, environment, civic discourse, collective mental health, and social-emotional health as a society?”
Still, some researchers suggest there are currently no definitive best practices regarding the role of AI in media literacy because technological adances are moving too fast to keep up. That’s why researchers like Justin Reich, an associate professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recommends that educators take an experimental approach. When they work 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 it is used in those ways.
“The best path that you have moving forward is to say, ‘All right, what are the particular opportunities that we see in front of us, and how could we do some local experiments to test new ideas?’” said Reich.
What high school graduates should know about AI
Kelly Guilfoil, an English teacher and multilingual specialist at Lake Stevens High School in Washington state, is addressing ethics and AI at the school. She delivers a single-period lesson to different classes in which students discuss transparency, human involvement, and critical thinking regarding AI use.
She also created a three-pronged guideline for students:
- Always be clear and honest about how AI is used to complete an assignment;
- Think critically about what AI is doing specifically to assist them;
- And, when contemplating the use of AI, students should ask themselves, “Would my teacher do this for me?” If the answer is no, then they should not use AI to do the same thing.
AI has caused “such a new definition of creation that there are students who do not understand that when they put in a prompt and they get results that they didn’t create those results,” said Guilfoil. She emphasizes in her lessons that if students use AI and it begins with human prompting, it should end with human reflection.
During her time teaching this lesson, Guilfoil found a big divide among the student population regarding the use of AI. There are “students who are regularly using AI and maybe minimally thinking about the ethical considerations and then almost another half who are consciously avoiding AI because of the ethical considerations,” she said.
In Wyoming, Jonathan Broersma, a 5th-grade teacher and the assistant director of technology at Clearmont K-12 School, has started introducing the idea of critical thinking when it comes to AI.
His students are only using AI for small activities, such as getting feedback for an essay they are writing or researching a topic. But Broersma encourages them to question the responses AI provides. “It’s a lot faster using an AI platform to get the information, but we want to make sure that we have the sources so we can verify where [AI] got the information from,” he said.
Some researchers argue that AI literacy can be difficult to teach if teachers themselves haven’t learned it through professional development.
Broersma has been working with teachers to address this challenge. He said teachers recently did a deep-dive into the Wyoming Profile of a Graduate and how it intersects with AI literacy.
A core competency of the Wyoming Profile is that graduates should be able to identify and use credible sources of information to build knowledge and make informed decisions. While that core competency doesn’t specify AI in the description, Broersma and some teachers discussed “the nuances of using AI specifically when it can be considered ‘credible’ and when it requires extra scrutiny.”
“Our goal is to move beyond just using AI for efficiency and instead use it as a tool to help students become better researchers and critical thinkers,” Broersma said.
