As generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more common in learning, work, and decision-making, understanding how it works and how to approach it responsibly is an important part of navigating a changing environment. AI literacy helps USask students, educators, and staff build the knowledge and judgment needed to determine when AI might be helpful, how to check the information it generates, and how to use it responsibly.
Understanding generative AI
What is generative artificial intelligence?
Generative artificial intelligence is a type of technology that can create new content, such as text, images, audio, or code, in response to prompts (the instructions or questions you provide). As these tools become more common, they are increasingly being used to support learning, research, administrative work, and other tasks across the university. Because AI is now built into many technologies people use every day, understanding how it works is becoming increasingly important.
What can generative artificial intelligence do?
Generative artificial intelligence can assist with tasks such as generating text, summarizing information, creating images, analyzing data, and supporting problem-solving. These tools can support learning, teaching, research, and administrative work by helping people explore ideas, complete tasks more efficiently, and work with information in different ways.
What are the limitations and risks of generative artificial intelligence?
Generative AI can produce inaccurate or misleading information, reflect biases in its training data, and generate outputs that may appear confident but require verification. Inputting sensitive or confidential information into AI tools may also pose privacy and data security risks.
As AI becomes more common in learning, work, research, and everyday technologies, understanding these limitations is an important part of using it responsibly. AI literacy helps USask students, faculty, and staff develop the knowledge and judgment needed to determine when AI may be helpful, how to evaluate its outputs, and how to use it appropriately. The resources below provide role-specific learning opportunities to help build that understanding.
Where to go next
Select the option that best matches your role to continue building your AI literacy through guided learning and practical examples tailored to your work or studies:
Public access to USask's AI literacy tutorial
Artificial intelligence is increasingly influencing how people learn, work, and engage with information. As the use of AI becomes more common in everyday life, people need opportunities to understand how it works, where it can be helpful, and where caution may be needed.
The university developed its AI literacy tutorials to help students, educators, and staff build confidence using AI responsibly. To help make this learning more widely accessible, USask has made a public version of the foundational tutorial available, giving anyone access to the same learning experience.
The self-paced tutorial explores prompting strategies, evaluating AI-generated content, ethical and responsible use, practical applications, and understanding when AI may not be the right tool for a task.
To make AI literacy accessible to a broader audience, USask has removed Network Services ID (NSID) login requirements for the public version of this tutorial. Anyone can access and explore its content without a university account.
Reuse and adapt the tutorial
The University of Saskatchewan encourages others to adapt and build on this tutorial to support AI literacy and help people make informed decisions about the opportunities and limitations of artificial intelligence.
Educators, institutions, and organizations interested in adapting the public AI literacy tutorial can contact the Gwenna Moss Teaching and Learning Centre (GMCTL) to learn more.