Canada Needs to Teach Students to Question AI

Yesterday, the federal government unveiled AI for All, Canada’s new national artificial intelligence strategy. Among its commitments is a National AI Literacy Initiative that aims to bring AI training to students, educators, and Canadians across the country. The announcement reflects a growing recognition that AI is reshaping how Canadians learn, work, and participate in public life. But as policymakers focus on expanding access to AI tools, an equally important question remains largely unanswered: what does it mean to be AI-literate in the first place?

Too often, AI literacy is framed as a technical or productivity skill. The assumption is that Canadians need to learn how to use AI. Yet in an era of deepfakes, synthetic media, algorithmically generated misinformation, and AI-generated content, the more pressing challenge may be learning how to question it. If Canada is serious about AI literacy, it should build its approach on the foundations of media literacy and critical thinking.

Canada is entering an era in which seeing is no longer believing.

From sexually explicit deepfakes to AI-generated misinformation and disinformation circulating across news and social media, the impacts of generative AI are becoming increasingly visible and increasingly difficult to ignore.

As a media literacy researcher and teaching assistant, I have seen firsthand how students struggle to navigate increasingly complex digital environments. The rise of generative AI has deepened this uncertainty. Many of my undergraduate students no longer see misinformation as simply a matter of identifying unreliable websites or misleading social media posts. Instead, they are confronting a digital environment in which virtually any image, video, audio clip, or text can be convincingly fabricated. Faced with this reality, many question whether traditional media literacy approaches remain sufficient and worry that growing dependence on AI tools is eroding their capacity for independent critical thought.

A recent KPMG in Canada survey reflects this concern: among the 73 percent of Canadian students surveyed who use GenAI, nearly half (48 percent) believe their critical thinking skills are declining. This raises serious questions about the future of education in Canada. Not all Canadian school boards have formal AI policies, and many are still in development. As students increasingly use AI tools, more attention must be given to how they are taught to navigate a world reshaped by AI-generated media.

Beyond the ChatGPT Debate

Across the country, educators are debating how students should engage with AI. Recent reporting on the issue shows that Canadian professors are beginning to “weave” AI into their teaching. For example, a University of Toronto professor allows students to use AI in a “reaction dialogue” on weekly readings, engaging with a chatbot to explore key ideas. Such approaches reflect a broader effort to adapt to AI’s growing role in education rather than simply banning it. This can be a step in the right direction, giving students opportunities to experiment with AI while critically evaluating its strengths, limitations, and impact on their learning, rather than treating AI use as something that occurs beyond the classroom.

These debates focus largely on classroom management: Should ChatGPT be allowed? Can students use AI for brainstorming or research? How should educators respond to AI-assisted cheating? While important, they focus on how students use AI rather than what they need to understand about it. In Canada, AI literacy is often framed as a technical or productivity skill. Less attention is paid to AI literacy as a civic competency that helps people critically evaluate AI-generated information, understand the technology’s broader social implications, and navigate an increasingly AI-mediated information environment.

Why AI Literacy Requires Media Literacy

The Massachusetts-based grassroots organization Media Literacy Now argues that AI literacy cannot exist without media literacy. According to the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), media literacy is “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication.” In Canada, the Toronto-based Association for Media Literacy (AML) has long emphasized that media are not neutral reflections of reality but actively shape how people understand the world. Some of its Eight Key Concepts of Media Literacy highlight that “media construct reality,” “communicate political and social messages,” and are interpreted differently by different audiences. These principles are particularly relevant in the age of generative AI. Understanding how AI systems produce content, whose interests they reflect, and how their outputs shape public understanding requires many of the same critical skills that media literacy has sought to cultivate for decades.

The concepts align with a “critical media literacy approach”, which, as Allison Butler explains, centres on power and social justice to better understand media’s influence. These ideas draw, in part, on the work of Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan, whose famous phrase “the medium is the message” helped pave the way for critical media literacy, and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who studied how media messages are encoded and decoded by audiences.

The Collapse of Evidentiary Trust

As GenAI systems and their outputs grow more complex and, at times, contradictory, they pose new challenges for media literacy. Traditionally, media literacy education has assumed that different forms of media possess at least some evidentiary value. Although media can certainly be manipulated, doing so once required specialized expertise, substantial time, and resources. With GenAI, realistic fake images, cloned voices, fabricated news, and synthetic videos can be created quickly and distributed globally at little or no cost. The barrier to producing and spreading misinformation and disinformation has collapsed. As my students have observed, traditional advice, such as “don’t believe everything you read online,” is no longer sufficient. We now inhabit a digital ecosystem where seeing is no longer believing.

Democracy in an Age of Synthetic Media

This shift has serious consequences for Canadian democracy. A populace inundated with AI-generated misinformation and disinformation does not remain merely misinformed; it becomes cynical. When people lose confidence in their ability to distinguish authentic evidence from fabricated content, trust in journalism, public institutions, and even a shared sense of reality begins to erode. Canada is not immune to these challenges.

Reports of AI-generated deepfakes targeting young people are increasing, amplifying cyberbullying and online harassment. The federal government has warned about foreign information campaigns using synthetic media and coordinated online manipulation. Meanwhile, a survey conducted last year by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) suggests that the use of GenAI has doubled, while trust in online information, especially on social media, has weakened substantially.

Organizations such as MediaSmarts and the AML have long advocated for stronger digital and media literacy education. Earlier this year, on March 27, MediaSmarts hosted Canada’s first AI Literacy Day and shared resources to help educational stakeholders demystify AI. However, the rapid pace of GenAI development has outstripped existing educational frameworks. Media literacy curricula still vary widely across provinces, and AI-specific misinformation and disinformation are often addressed inconsistently or not at all.

A National Framework for Critical AI Literacy

Canada is at an inflection point. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new national AI strategy, released yesterday, includes a commitment to “Establish a National AI Literacy Initiative,” among other measures. This initiative is aimed at entry-level post-secondary students and educators and will provide access to “AI learning kits.”  As part of this strategy, the federal government should commit to developing a foundational framework for critical AI literacy, building on existing media literacy and critical media literacy practices. This is especially important because the strategy also indicates that post-secondary students will have the opportunity to use AI agents across a range of disciplines. AI, and GenAI in particular, must be better understood. But what does it mean to be AI-literate? Is it simply a matter of knowing how to use these tools? Does it require understanding their technical underpinnings? Or does it also involve recognizing their broader social implications? Although the federal government cannot dictate provincial curricula, it can work with provinces, educators, and civil society organizations such as MediaSmarts to develop a national framework and shared standards for critical AI literacy.

AI tools can support learning, improve accessibility, and help young people develop valuable technical skills. Students who use these systems responsibly will likely have an advantage in future workplaces. Yet technological fluency without critical media literacy is not empowering; it creates vulnerability. A student who can generate a polished essay with AI but cannot identify a fabricated source, recognize a synthetic political message, or understand its broader societal implications is not fully prepared for citizenship in the digital age.

This requires a fundamental shift in how Canada approaches education policy. Media literacy, and especially critical media literacy, can no longer be treated as a niche topic occasionally folded into English or social studies classrooms. In the age of AI, it must stand alongside reading, writing, and numeracy as a core civic competency. Any move toward a critical AI literacy framework should be grounded in critical media literacy.

Teaching Students to Question AI

Students need to be taught how algorithms shape what they see online, how emotionally manipulative content spreads, how deepfakes are created, and how to verify information across platforms. Above all, they must understand how AI affects the world around them, from social to environmental impacts. Teachers need stronger training on synthetic media, misinformation, and disinformation. Provinces should establish clear, consistent standards for AI and media literacy education, rather than relying on fragmented or optional approaches.

Canada often frames AI as a technological race driven by innovation and competitiveness. Yet the more urgent challenge may be cultural rather than technical. The key question is not simply whether Canadians can use AI effectively, but whether they can continue to participate in a society where truth remains publicly recognizable.

AI is reshaping how Canadians communicate, learn, and participate in public life. But if schools focus only on teaching students how to generate information and create content with AI, rather than how to interrogate it, the country risks raising a generation fluent in AI tools yet vulnerable to AI manipulation. In a world where reality itself can be manufactured, critical thinking is no longer just an academic skill; it is a civic necessity.