It seems that hardly a day passes without an update to generative AI, and its position in the world of media is developing rapidly. UNESCO’s Global Media and Information Literacy Week is themed around AI this year, indicating how much (whether we like it or not) it is becoming a part of our everyday lives. According to an article by OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, 700 million people use it weekly as of 15 September 2025. So, what are the implications of this?
At University, this often looks like people generating tutorial notes last-minute or perhaps asking ChatGPT to help outline an essay structure. One student I spoke to told me she uses it to help “mark” her essays.
“I find it useful to paste in a section of my essay and ask it if I am meeting the main criteria of the essay,” she said. “Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in your work you actually need to take a step back and ask, ‘what am I actually trying to say?’”
One could argue that students should go to tutors or peers for input on their essay before going to AI, but it is easy enough to explain why people resort to it. ChatGPT and other generative AI produce responses in mere seconds and have access to endless databases on a huge array of subjects. When you’re running low on time and need an answer right there and then, AI can seem like the best option.
It’s not just the younger generation. A study at the University of Michigan found over half of adults over 50 use AI technology in their lives, with 12 per cent having used it for social connections. It is clear that AI is affecting huge swathes of the population, so now more than ever it is essential to understand what the effect of this usage is, and one of the biggest impacts it is having is on our media literacy.
Media literacy is about understanding how a message was created and the implications behind that. AI can sift through huge amounts of information at almost impossible speeds, presenting information at the click of a button. AI boxes from Google searches are a good example of this; it finds what it believes to be the most relevant information, presenting it to the user in an easy-to-read way. This supposedly saves time when one just needs the answer quickly, but is it wearing down our critical thinking skills? Being able to sift through and find relevant information yourself is a crucial life skill, especially for university students. Whether it’s looking for a quick answer on Google, or reading yet another 50-page-long reading assignment for a tutorial, being able to analyse what is important in a certain article is a skill we should not take for granted, nor one we should rely on AI to do instead.
Losing these skills decreases our media literacy; one only has to look at the influx of AI content on Instagram or TikTok to notice this. Sora, the new app created by OpenAI, where people can create videos from AI prompts, all get reposted onto other apps. Although there is a watermark on these videos to classify them as AI, they can easily be removed. Some of the videos are obviously AI, but there are plenty that fly under the radar. This can seem harmless on a surface level, but it is breaking down our ability to detect fake content and to critically engage with the media in front of us. This translates from a simple doomscroll all the way up to more sophisticated media, including articles, books, and music. Losing the ability to detect AI destroys our media literacy and creates a system where we believe everything we see, which can become very dangerous very quickly.
Where does this leave us? The conversation needs to move away from how to avoid AI because, like it or not, it is here to stay and affects all of our lives. It’s now about how to live with it; how to use it in a way that assists us, not takes over from our own abilities. An article from Tech Policy Press insists that media literacy education must become an integrated part of our education systems to give people the tools they need to understand the content they consume. AI can be used in a positive way to aid us in our lives, but as a still relatively new field of technology, the danger comes from a lack of guidelines surrounding it and a lack of comprehension as to just how powerful it is, and will continue to be. Meanwhile, it is important to stay vigilant and, when engaging with material online, think about what you’re really looking at.