Persicaria: Promoting ethical AI literacy into mainstream societal consensus
To create accessible, down to earth educational material that raises public awareness on implications of day to day AI usage, and encourages ethical AI literacy in environments where AI can impact societally changing decisions.
To create accessible, down to earth educational material that raises public awareness on implications of day to day AI usage, and encourages ethical AI literacy in environments where AI can impact societally changing decisions.
Project Details
Updated 07/13/26 · Edited by orgWhat are we doing?
Our team wants to continue making educational resources that improve ethical AI literacy in general society. We hope to do this through making interactive content and hosting both online and in person workshops, hoping to translate the concept of responsible usage into a more understandable appeal to the everyday person. We hope in the long term to also ultimately provide a free and accessible platform which anyone can readily learn the risks that could arise in specific fields, including but not limited to certain occupations where AI can shape decision/policy making societally for the better or worse.
Who is involved?
We currently have a team of around ~30 people who are spread around making the resources, researching the risks, gathering user feedback on their perceptions of potential issues and the delivery team. We believe that currently most of the general public is unaware of the potential risks of AI misuse, with most day to day usage being self centred. As such, our material tutorials will focus on raising awareness on preventable adverse impacts of AI usage, and hope to cover a wide range of fields from its implications on academic integrity and malicious usage for harassment in schools, to its risks in company and corporate decisions such as making policy or financial decisions based on findings on hallucinated data, or privacy breaches from carelessly inputting sensitive data such as personal records into LLMs.
Our concrete output?
The output is that we hope to see a trend of negligent AI usage decrease across all fields, and achieve make responsible AI usage mainstream societal consensus based on a thorough understanding of risks rather than personal intitution on what is right or wrong. In the long term, we hope to see the trend of societal harm simply arising from user negligence of AI be reduced, especially in sensitive sectors where even simply to proofread data that may contain AI hallucinations could directly influence government or corporate policies that can impact entire communities.
Theory of Impact
Updated 07/17/26 · By grantmaking.aiCurrently most of the safeguards against adverse AI implications are focused on the hardware side, and we are worried about catastrophes simply stemming from user end negligence. We believe that encouraging ethical usage, and ultimately promoting a societal consensus to responsibly apply AI technologies for any use is a very cost effective way to mitigate harm in any future scenario. We seek the advancement of AI literacy in becoming an accessible, fundamental right imperative in avoiding adverse risks that arise from the exponentially growing gap between AI capability and a global populace mostly underequipped with harnessing its potential for benefit.
No matter how robust a technical safety mechanism could be, the capacity for all of that to be undone by simple user negligence is something that is painfully overlooked. This has already become a reality and could progress to something much worse- for instance, where we are based in, Australia, saw consulting companies give an AI generated report with hallucinated findings that would have influenced national policy and decision making, costing taxpayers over 500k, and also would have carried out more serious implications if critical decisions were made simply to due a lack of ethical consideration when utilising AI tools.
If down the line, such sheer negligence had been failed to be identified and thus applied onto the decision making of governmental bodies, it could lead to policies that dramatically alter the livelihoods of entire societies, and already can bring harm before AGI would even be a reality. Even individually, a sole drone operator in war who fails to check on whether a target identified by AI is a civilian or a legitimate combatant could carry immense moral ramifications. Even in a less than ideal scenario where only a small amount of people would have been aware of the ethical implications of AI usage and be encouraged to responsibly use such technologies, the capacity to fundamentally prevent negligent harm if even a single person there carried the risk of impacting other's livelihoods from using AI without an awareness of responsibility is still significant.
People
Updated 07/11/26 · Edited by orgRisk Research
Funding Details
- Sep 14, 2025
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- As long as we can continue
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Track Record
- Hosted 30+ workshops in high schools and community centres across metropolitan Sydney
- Collected firsthand data of societal awareness towards such risks, such as understanding towards implications of academic integrity, the privacy of others when using AI tools such as deepfakes, and the risk of failing to verify AI outputs in sensitive sectors that can shape policy
- Utilised said data to identify 10+ Risks emerging from user end negligence and implemented these to raised awareness for 1,000+ individuals through continually updated lesson material
- Published said risks into accessible, understandable articles in an easy to digest format
Hi Justin,
I made some comments on your other application, so I wont repeat the same comments here.
Good luck!
Thank you!