Katie Conrad and Sean Kamperman, professors at the University of Kansas and co-directors of the AI and Digital Literacy Institute (ADL), deliver the opening keynote of the Humans First conference, making the case for critical AI literacy — an approach that treats AI adoption as a choice rather than an inevitability.

Drawing on three years of ADL institutes, Conrad and Kamperman walk through how generative AI actually works (and what it doesn't do — think, reason, or know), then dig into the harms educators need to reckon with before bringing these tools into the classroom: baked-in bias in text and image generation, persistent and often undetectable hallucination, data privacy risks, labor exploitation behind the scenes, environmental costs, and the cognitive effects of offloading thinking onto a chatbot. Along the way they share classroom-ready lesson plans and resources built by ADL participants — on bias detection, hallucination hunting, environmental justice mapping, and AI licensing systems for student use — all designed to give students and teachers the tools to make informed, sometimes skeptical, choices about when and whether to use AI at all.

The conversation closes with audience Q&A on teaching AI's risks hands-on and on the limits of the "AI is just like a calculator" analogy.

Recorded live at the Humans First conference, Marist School, July 2026. Produced by Nic Hoffmann for Marist Podcasting. This podcast series is created with support from ⁠DELTA⁠ at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focused on human formation in the age of AI.

The theme is "Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.