is u AI literate? AI, McLuhan & Media pt.4

Total AI Slop

📚 Marshall McLuhan observed that every new medium demands a new literacy. I've heard moving pictures of locomotives scared early cinemagoers, as they lacked the visual literacy to understand the train wasn't about to run then over. Online fandoms often operate in a hyperliterate fashion, cycling through modes as they navigate primary texts, memes, non-canon UGC, fan cut videos, etc..

AI, as a media platform, requires something new: a literacy that helps us both harness its creative potential and navigate its risks.

🖌️ Learning to Create with AI

As I explored in my last post, AI extends our creative faculties, but using it effectively isn’t as simple as pressing a button. It requires a new set of skills:

✒️ Prompt Crafting – Knowing how to guide AI toward desired outcomes. The more precise and iterative the process, the better the results.

🖼️ Curation & Editing – AI-generated content isn’t an endpoint; it’s raw material. We need to refine, shape, and inject meaning.

🤹 Multi-Modal Thinking – AI blurs the lines between text, image, audio, and video. Future creators will need to think across formats more fluidly than ever before.

Literacy in AI also means knowing when, how, and why to use it in the first place. Not every task should be automated, and not every AI-generated piece is worth using. (MOST are not, in my experience, even if they are aesthetically beautiful, since there's usually a detail or two that don't work for your context. This is true whether it's Midjourney, krea.ai, Luma AI, Leonardo AI, DALL-E Open Ai , or others...)

🛡️ Learning to Defend Against AI’s Risks 🗡️

AI introduces new risks—some of which require their own kind of literacy to navigate:

👍 Ethical Use – Understanding the implications of AI-generated content, from deepfakes to biased outputs, and making responsible choices about when and how to use it.

⚖️ Bias Awareness – AI is shaped by the data it’s trained on, which means it inherits human biases. Knowing this helps us question and critically assess its outputs.

🔎 Detection & Skepticism – AI-generated content will only get more convincing. Learning to recognize, verify, and challenge what we see and read will be crucial.

🪟 Transparency & Attribution – Should audiences know when something is AI-generated? As creators, how do we responsibly credit work shaped by machine input? At what point do we need to?

McLuhan argued that media don’t just extend our faculties—they reshape them. The question is whether we will become passive consumers of AI-generated media or develop the literacy to shape and understand it—ethically and critically. 

How will this play out...? I'm heartened by the fact that stories of AI ethics have gotten a lot of ink, helping to raise awareness of some of these problems, but I worry what damage will be done by bad actors in the generation or so before scooter gains the literacy to contextualize the train barreling toward us.