AFT Partners with NewsGuard and GPTZero to Support Educators Navigating AI and to Make It Safe, Useful for Students

WASHINGTON—The American Federation of Teachers announced today it is launching a partnership with GPTZero, the leading artificial intelligence identification platform, and strengthening its media literacy partnership with NewsGuard, a leading anti-misinformation tool, offering both as resources for classroom educators. In addition to promoting media and news literacy, the goal of the partnership is to give educators robust, scalable assistance to use AI in their classrooms, allowing them to help their students use AI technology effectively. The partnership is a more holistic approach to information integrity: integrity in the use of high-quality sources, and integrity in the transparent use of generative AI. 

As research suggests, teachers continue to support incorporating new technology into the classroom, advocating tools and safeguards like these so educators, parents, legislators and tech companies can better work together to ensure accountability and oversight. But with disinformation and potential abuse of AI running high, educators have identified an increasingly urgent need to propose solutions, including the expansion of media literacy and tools to detect the misuse of AI. These solutions will encourage critical thinking, enhance the pursuit of knowledge, and sharpen the ability of students to think critically and recognize misinformation—all important skills for students to be successful in college, career and life. 

AFT President Randi Weingarten hailed the partnership as a game-changer for teachers and students navigating the evolving landscape of media literacy and AI technology: “As technology evolves, and disinformation is a click away, we are constantly trying to help our students separate fact from fiction, as we help them develop their critical-thinking and analytical skills. That’s where both of these tools come in. Seventy-one percent of educators use education technology every day in the classroom, and students are using AI more every day, so offering educators simple tools to make sure it’s used safely and effectively is critical. They’re a magnifying glass to help teachers get a closer look behind the scenes of a document, ultimately creating a better exchange of ideas, and a more productive integration of this promising tech that can help kids learn, do well, and get excited about school assignments when used appropriately.

“AI is a game-changer, but teachers need to be coaches in the game. And in our effort to find real solutions that enhance student learning, it’s just as important that students continue writing original content to build critical-thinking skills and learn to express their thoughts truthfully and coherently, so they’re adequately prepared for opportunities when they enter the world.”

Steven Brill, co-CEO of NewsGuard said:

“By providing access to these complementary tools, the AFT is putting itself at the forefront of a new era of media literacy and information integrity. In this new era, students learn not only the source evaluation skills long associated with media literacy, but also the newly important discipline of responsible AI use in the classroom.”

 Edward Tian, CEO of GPTZero said:

“We launched GPTZero to give everyone, everywhere, the ability to understand the origin and veracity of the information they consume. The first people we talked to were teachers, because in education the source of information matters. Even more, as the nature of AI usage rapidly evolves, we want to expose the parochial hood, and let students, teachers, and policymakers transparently see where and how new technologies are being applied in the classroom.

“Working with the AFT, together, we are committed to giving teachers not only the tools, but also the frameworks for helping students learn. Recognizing AI is not plagiarism; we are determined to replace the plagiarism framework with a collaborative mindset, where identifying AI becomes the common ground for teachers and students in navigating AI together.” 

Through the partnership, all AFT members will have priority access to a series of new tools developed for pedagogical AI teaching, including the GPTZero Origins Writing Report as well as a series of practical AI workshops co-organized by the AFT and GPTZero. The first 15,000 teachers to register will receive unlimited school year access to GPTZero’s core AI identification platform. And through this partnership, all AFT members will be able to request access codes to enable their students, colleagues and families to use NewsGuard’s tool at no cost and to access  NewsGuard’s “Disinformation Risk Briefing,” a weekly digest of the top misinformation and disinformation trends and narratives.

AFT members looking to start using these tools today can fill out the form at this site.

About NewsGuard

Founded by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands and democracies. Since launching in 2018, its global staff of trained journalists and information specialists has collected, updated, and deployed more than 6.9 million data points on more than 35,000 news and information sources to catalog and track all of the top false narratives spreading online.

As part of the partnership with NewsGuard, AFT members and students who opt in will continue to have access to the NewsGuard browser extension at no cost. This will enable students and their teachers to access reliability ratings and detailed “nutrition labels” for thousands of online news sources. These labels are created based on NewsGuard’s nine apolitical criteria of journalistic practice.

About GPTZero

GPTZero is on a mission to enable responsible AI use and preserve the value of human content. Since launching the first AI identification platform in January 2023, GPTZero has provided software solutions to millions of users across academia, journalism, and writers, for both identifying AI involvement in assignments and for verifying the authenticity of human writing. GPTZero consistently benchmarks as the best-performing AI identifier on the market, and remains dedicated to its educator customer base.