Five critical questions before using AI

Recommended for: Any course where students hand in work they produced outside class

Background for the instructor

Critical AI literacy is the ability to evaluate and situate the use of AI tools, which is a matter of judgement rather than of operating the tool. The five questions below make that judgement explicit and repeatable.

Procedure

1. Introduce the five questions and what each one is for.
   • What am I giving up if I do not do this myself? Where a task is about thinking, creating or deciding, the process may matter more than the product.
   • Which perspective is missing from this output? AI systems are trained on dominant languages and largely Western sources.
   • What do I lose if this output turns out to be wrong and I do not notice? AI can be convincing and incorrect at the same time.
   • Who benefits from my using this tool? You are the customer, except where you are the product.
   • Would I trust this output if I did not know it came from AI? If the answer is no, you are trusting the technology rather than the content.
2. Have students apply the five questions to a task from your own course, in writing and in pairs.
3. Compare answers plenary and note where students disagree about the same task.
4. Agree which of the five matter most in your discipline, and keep them visible for the rest of the course.

Discussion questions

• Which of the five is hardest to answer honestly, and why?
• Are there tasks in this course where all five point the same way?
• What would you have to know about a tool to answer question four?

Assessment opportunity

Students attach their answers to the five questions to a piece of work, and reflect on whether their eventual use of AI matched what they had decided beforehand.

Extension options

A fuller version of the same idea, developed at Boston University, arranges the question as a decision flower with seven overlapping petals rather than a list. Students consider, before they open the tool: their own motive (what are your goals for using AI here?), accuracy (do you trust this tool, and can you say why?), ethics (is the value of your using it greater than its cost?), consequences (what might happen if you do?), privacy (are you comfortable with this prompt attached to your name?), copyright (do you want to keep the rights to this idea?) and transparency (are you prepared to show how you used it?).

It also works as a physical activity, which is how it was adapted for writing tutors: one sheet per petal around the room, and participants circulating with sticky notes to add strategies and further questions under each.

Reference

• Illingworth (2026), What is critical AI literacy? theslowai.substack.com
• The decision flower is Pause Before You Prompt by Eva Sclippa, Jack Mulvaney, Kristina Bush, Lucy Flamm, Maggie Boyd and Natalie LoRusso, Boston University, 2025. The authors state that the materials are free to use. theimportantwork.substack.com
• Didactische tip in voorbereiding: "Hoe begin je het gesprek met je studenten over AI?" (VU Centre for Teaching & Learning, 2026)