AI Literacy Research: Frontier for High-Impact Research and Ethics

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a driving force in scientific development, influencing areas such as Administration and Public Administration, which are central themes of the publication of the Brazilian Administration Review (BAR). Despite transformative promises, AI’s appropriate and ethical use in academia still presents substantial challenges, especially for researchers who require specific skills to understand, critique, and utilize these technologies (Dwivedi et al., 2023; Susarla et al., 2023). Even though it is an important support tool to improve texts, the risks of hallucination (generating wrong information) and transformation of already written texts (plagiarism) worry the academic community. In addition, the continuous advancement of generative language models (LLMs) makes AI-written text detection tools often unreliable. AI literacy emerges, in this context, as an essential competence for researchers to deal with AI tools critically, ethically, and effectively.

This editorial discusses the growing need to promote AI literacy as a fundamental prerequisite for researchers. It reflects on the impacts of this competence on the training of scientists capable of exploring AI’s potential while understanding its limitations and ethical implications. We argue that research on AI literacy should be a priority, not only as an emerging field of study but also as a central axis in preparing the next generation of researchers, ensuring the responsible use of AI in advancing knowledge.