Professor Alan Smeaton:

In all of our advisory papers which we produced earlier this year, the need for AI literacy was transient across all of them. In every element we bring and give advice on, one of the foundations is AI literacy. One of the countries which was most advanced in this was Finland, which produced a course for the nation. There are reports that a huge proportion of the population have taken that online course in Finland. Already that is dated because it was last year. That course has been replicated across different jurisdictions, including in Ireland. It was hosted in UCC, for example. It is very hard. What makes AI literacy a difficult thing to convey is people do not believe they need it because they are already sucked into the anthropomorphisation of it. Deputy Keogh talks about her companion. She talks about it as if it is a real companion. The second aspect is the underpinning technology is so fast moving and so fast changing that even the Finnish example, which was rolled out nationwide, is already quite dated. It is one of the foundations. It keeps recurring across all of our sub-working groups. It is necessary. It comes from the fact we have a mental model of many of the technologies that we use. We do not have a mental model of what a large language model is. Most people do not know. It is a black box. There is something in there and it comes out with some stuff that is based on same training data from the Internet - end of. It is really important. It is really a foundation.