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This paper critiques existing frameworks for AI literacy, arguing that they promote a consumer-oriented approach that limits individuals' epistemic agency. By integrating Foucault's power-knowledge concept and Freire's critical pedagogy, the authors propose a redefined AI literacy that empowers individuals to critically evaluate AI systems and engage in their governance. The study highlights how unequal access to AI tools perpetuates epistemic injustices and introduces a three-part framework emphasizing contextual use, critical interrogation, and participatory governance to cultivate epistemic agents.
AI literacy needs a radical overhaul to transform users into empowered agents capable of challenging and governing AI systems, not just passive consumers.
As generative artificial intelligence becomes one of the most significant systems of knowledge production in our society today, questions relating to who can access and shape that production grow increasingly important in our discourse. This paper argues that the existing frameworks for AI literacy, which are dominated by technical competency and responsible-use principles, are insufficient because they enforce a"consumer"orientation toward AI rather than fostering genuine epistemic agency. Based upon Foucault's concept of power-knowledge, Freire's pedagogy of critical consciousness, and scholarship of digital literacy, this paper proposes a reconceptualization of AI literacy as a critical practice that equips individuals not just to use AI systems, but to critically evaluate them, resist their structuring assumptions, and participate in their governance. The paper further argues that unequal access to AI tools in society recapitulates longstanding epistemic injustices, and that a literacy framework oriented toward empowerment must account for these structural inequities. A three-part framework of AI literacy based on the notions of contextual use, critical interrogation, and participatory governance frames this literacy as a cultivation of epistemic"agents"rather than the training of competent consumers of AI-generated information.