The Right to Red-Team: Adversarial AI Literacy as a Civic Imperative in K-12 Education

Devan Walton; Haesol Bae

NeurIPS 2025poster0 citations

The Right to Red-Team: Adversarial AI Literacy as a Civic Imperative in K-12 Education

Abstract

The increasing societal integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and agent-based AI demands a new civic competency: adversarial reasoning. This position paper argues that K-12 AI education must move beyond passive literacy to actively equip students with skills in responsible adversarial prompting and ethical system "hacking." Such capabilities are essential for citizens to critically probe AI systems, understand their inherent limitations, identify manipulative patterns, and hold them accountable. We posit that cultivating a generation skilled in "red-teaming" AI is vital for maintaining transparency, preventing undue influence, and fostering a democratic engagement with these transformative technologies.

AI literacyK-12 educationRed-teamingAI safety

BibTeX

@inproceedings{
walton2025the,
title={The Right to Red-Team: Adversarial {AI} Literacy as a Civic Imperative in K-12 Education},
author={Devan Walton and Haesol Bae},
booktitle={The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Position Paper Track},
year={2025},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=vlM9rLv5xB}
}