Critical AI Literacy: When to Use AI and When to Leave It Alone

Dr Sam Illingworth

Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy

Covered by the Maven Guarantee

Knowing when to trust AI is a skill. This is where you build it.

You use AI every day at work, and you have started to feel the cost.It invents facts you have to catch, flattens your writing into the same grey voice everyone else is using, agrees with whatever you say, and quietly erodes the skills you are actually paid for.

The hard part now is knowing when to believe what it gives you.

AI is in the room for almost every professional decision, and the advice has not kept up. Most of it teaches you to prompt faster. None of it teaches you to judge what comes back.

This course builds that judgement.

Over four live sessions, taught through the humanities by a Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy, you learn to spot the four moves AI makes on you, name the hidden costs behind a confident answer, protect the skills you cannot afford to lose, and decide, every time, when to use AI and when to leave it alone.

You practise on the work you actually do, running each method on your own AI tools, grounded in recent peer-reviewed research, alongside a cohort working through it with you. You leave with critical faculties you will use for the rest of your career.

What you’ll learn

You will move from using AI on faith to using it with judgement: spotting when it helps, catching when it harms, and knowing the difference.

Catch AI fooling you before you act on it.

A thirty-second check that catches fabricated facts, stats and citations.

Spot the moment a model folds to flatter you, and the prompts that stop it.

Tell the difference between being informed and being validated.

Protect the skills your work depends on.

Spot which abilities AI is thinning while your output still looks fine.

A simple rule for what you hand over and what you keep doing yourself.

Ring-fence your core skill so AI sharpens it instead of eroding it.

Decide when to use AI and when to leave it alone.

A working framework for that judgement, applied to your own work.

Run it case by case on any tool, in any decision.

Built across four live sessions, each anchored in peer-reviewed research.

Learn directly from Sam

Dr Sam Illingworth

Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy

I am a Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy and the founder of Slow AI , a newsletter read by more than 21,000 people.

My work has been featured by WIRED , NPR, the BBC, The Financial Times , and Scientific American , and I teach people to use AI with judgement: when it helps, and when to leave it alone.

Career highlights

Author of GenAI in Higher Education: Redefining Teaching and Learning (Bloomsbury, 2026).

Founder of Slow AI , a Substack Bestseller with 21,000+ readers.

125+ peer-reviewed publications and 10 books;

h-index 27.

Katia and Maurice Krafft Award (2023), European Geosciences Union, for innovative engagement methods.

Expert evidence on AI to the Council of Europe, the European Commission, and the House of Lords.

Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA).