AI Literacy Baseline Survey

Section A

It reads through the whole internet each time you ask a question

It looks the answer up in a stored database of facts it was given

It generates text one piece at a time, choosing what is statistically likely to come next given everything so far

It applies a large set of grammar and logic rules written by engineers

It does not read text letter by letter — it works with larger chunks of text, so counting letters is unreliable

It only reads the first few letters of every word

Engineers testing it for bugs before release

A process that adjusted its internal settings so it better predicted text across an enormous collection of examples

Every correction a user types instantly changes the model for everyone

Writing explicit rules for every topic it should be able to handle

Its training data stops before then, so unless it can search, it fills the gap with text that just sounds right

Rewrite this paragraph in a more formal tone

Give me the page number and exact wording of a quotation from a little-known 1970s book

Ask the chatbot whether it is certain the source exists

Search for the exact title in a library catalogue or scholarly database

Check that the citation is formatted correctly

Ask the chatbot the same question again and see whether the citation matches

It may still favour male applicants, because other details on the application hint at gender — sports, schools, word choice

Look for distorted hands or garbled text within the image

Trace where the image first appeared and whether a credible source published it

Ask a few friends whether they think it looks real

Judge by whether it looks unusually perfect

Responses are produced with an element of randomness, and different models were built from different data and methods

This does not happen if the question is factual

The explanation is a faithful record of the process that produced the answer

The steps are just more text the model wrote, so they may not show how it really got the answer

The steps were checked by a human reviewer

Begin with "You are an expert English teacher"

Tell it exactly what to judge — structure, evidence, clarity — and show an example of the feedback you want

Write the request in capital letters for emphasis

It retrieves yesterday's code, because it remembers all your conversations

It has no access to that conversation unless memory is switched on, so it may just make up some code

Asking for five possible thesis statements, then writing your own argument

Pasting your finished paragraph and asking it to fix comma errors

Asking it to rewrite your clumsy sentence, then copying its version into your essay

Asking it to explain what a counterargument is