Springer Nature

Scientific American

Times Higher Education

The Conversation U.S.

Dr Sam Illingworth

Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy 

Founding Scholars (August 2026)

Cohort 1

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.

Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy

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.

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

Catch AI fooling you before you act on it.

Protect the skills your work depends on.

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

A professional who uses AI daily for work, has started to quietly distrust it, and wants the judgement to know when to rely on it.

An educator or researcher who needs to think clearly about AI for their teaching, writing and students, beyond another list of prompts.

A manager, founder or team lead deciding how AI enters their team, who needs the judgement to govern it and explain it to others.

Dr Sam Illingworth will help you slow down AI.

Dr Sam Illingworth

Courses

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

Lightning Lessons

Spot When AI Is Fooling You