The Labor Department wants to teach you to use AI more. Here's what we found

The Department of Labor launched the course titled "Make America AI-Ready" with a goal to, in the course's own words, "make AI feel less like a mystery and more like a tool you actually want to use." While AI and media literacy teachers praised the overall content and framework of the course, some of the course materials raise government ethics questions. Labor organizers also question whether courses like these will be helpful when it comes to addressing potential workforce changes driven by AI. The Labor Department partnered with technology company Arist to deliver the course. The company specializes in delivering short text message-based courses and has worked with organizations including Etsy, the Poynter Institute and the California's governor's office. While DOL developed the course content, Arist delivered the content for free as part of the White House's Pledge to America's Youth initiative without a contracting process, Stockton said. That arrangement is unusual, said Craig Holman, an expert on ethics, lobbying and campaign finance rules at the nonprofit, Public Citizen. "[A] company running a government program and not getting paid by the government to do it … sounds exceedingly suspicious to me." Labor advocates say this course doesn't look like effective worker training. "Does this [training] make workers' jobs better or safer? Will it help people who want to find a job access high quality, union jobs?" asked Lauren McFerran, chair of AFL-CIO's Tech Institute and a former chair of the National Labor Relations Board. "I'm not sure that teaching someone how to prompt an LLM is necessarily going to accomplish those goals."