Hear from GHS Senior
Hear from GHS Senior
Natalie Wiesner about this week of class!
Natalie Wiesner about this week of class!
Embedded Files
About Natalie
About Natalie
I’m Natalie Wiesner and am a Senior enrolled in our high school’s first Artificial Intelligence class taught this year! Outside of class I am in the National Honor Society, and I participate on the soccer and softball teams. Next year I plan on attending Ithaca College and majoring in Sports Media. This class has helped me expand my knowledge in AI and help me understand that it is an inevitable part of our future.
This week in AI we learned about the cognitive brain function when kids rely on ChatGPT and how it's harming learning and the education systems. We talked about how the reading and math scores have decreased so much in the past few years that it's harming kids and the education system. Math scores are down 70% in school districts no matter if they are at an economic advantage or not and the reading scores have decreased 83%. This is from kids being chronically absent and when the kids don’t show up to school they don’t know how to do the work so they turn to ChatGPT for the answers.
One concept that we talked about that I found interesting was Casual Offloading. Casual Offloading is the concept that people turn to ChatGPT for answers to questions they should have the answers for. Like the simple question of what they wanna have for lunch today or when they should go to bed. One question we have to ask ourselves is how severe will the questions get and who will be monitoring the questions if they become a threat to other people around them.
Another concept I found really interesting was the Copyright Law. We don’t realize how it affects our everyday life with the books you read and the movies you watch on an everyday basis. Copyright bears the question of “Who is legally responsible for the copyright if it's made with AI?” One major central problem is that AI systems destabilize ownership, creativity, and liability. When the Copyright Law was put in place, the laws were made around humans having the ability to copyright, not AI. The lawsuits around the Copyright Law and use of AI have the power to change the laws and make them more expandable to include AI.
Want to Keep Up to Date with Our Reading List?
Want to Keep Up to Date with Our Reading List?
See below for each week's readings and join the conversation!
See below for each week's readings and join the conversation!
Week 36 - This Week
Week 36 - This Week
Michael Gerlich, “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking”
Nataliya Kosmyna, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using AI” pages 1-4, 21,
Jinrui Tan, “Learners’ AI dependence and critical thinking: The psychological mechanism of fatigue and the social buffering role of AI literacy”
James O’Sullivan, “Stylometric comparisons of human versus AI-generated creative writing”
Particle6, “Hi, I’m Tilly Norwood!”
Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley: The Original Essay by Masahiro Mori”
Week 35
Week 35
Jacqueline Fendy, “Vibocracy and the Collapse of Shared Reality”
Jodi Kantor, “The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court”
Tony Rehagen, “Welcome to Post-Truth America”
Maxi Heitmayer, “The Second Wave of Attention Economics. Attention as a Universal Symbolic Currency on Social Media and beyond”
Week 34
Week 34
Wiki, Utopia
Thomas More, Utopia selections
Jamie Dimon, “Letter to Shareholders 2026”
US Govt, “National Security Strategy November 2025 Policy Document” (from last week’s readings!)
Alex Karp, The Technological Republic in Brief (from X)
Talmon Smith, “The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, With Familiar (Rich) Winners”
Week 33
Week 33
Alexis Madrigal, “The Energy in Things”
Eve Warburton, “Nationalist enclaves: Industrialising the critical mineral boom in Indonesia”
Nisha Talagala, “Data as The New Oil Is Not Enough: Four Principles For Avoiding Data Fires”
Juana Summers, “Dirty nickel: The health costs of mining in Indonesia”
Lawrence Wright, “Lithium Dreams”
Greg Rosalsky, “Why the AI world is suddenly obsessed with a 160-year-old economics paradox”
Camilla Domonoske, “Their batteries hurt the environment, but EVs still beat gas cars. Here's why.”
Rithwik Kalale, “Lithium mining for EVs: how sustainable is it?”
Soumya Karlamangla, “The California Lake Billed as the ‘Saudi Arabia of Lithium’”
Image, “This is a silicon wafer”
Week 32
Week 32
Wiki, “Mother Nature”
Ken Silverstein, “America’s AI Boom Is Running Into An Unplanned Water Problem”
Elizabeth Kolbert, “The E.P.A. vs. the Environment”
Adam Zewe, “Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact”
Shaolei Ren, “The Uneven Distribution of AI’s Environmental Impacts”
Carmen Gonzalez, “Environmental Justice, Human Rights, and the Global South Environmental Justice, Human Rights, and the Global South”
Megan Mastrola, “How AI Can Help Combat Climate Change”
Week 31
Week 31
Nathan Heller, “Is the Gig Economy Working?”
Matt Shumer, “Something Big is Happening”
Kashmir Hill, “Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here’s How It Happens.”
Jennifer Devries, “How Bad Are A.I. Delusions? We Asked People Treating Them.”
Rhitu Chatterjee, “Their teenage sons died by suicide. Now, they are sounding an alarm about AI chatbots”
Stuart Heritage, “‘I felt pure, unconditional love’: the people who marry their AI chatbots
Shannon Bond, “AI chatbots upended their lives. Now they're finding support from each other”
Johanna Costigan, “China's AI Boyfriend Business is Taking On a Life of Its Own”
Miles Klee, “This Spiral-Obsessed AI ‘Cult’ Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots”
Optional:
Andrew Clark, “The Ability of AI Therapy Bots to Set Limits With Distressed Adolescents: Simulation-Based Comparison Study”
Juliet Schor, “Dependence and precarity in the platform economy”
Week 30
Week 30
Wiki, “Satoshi Nakamoto”
John Carreyrou, “My Quest to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery”
Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”
TechScope, “Meme Coin Mania and Mayhem: Navigating the Blind Spots”
CoinMemeCap, “Top Memes Tokens by Market Capitalization”
Florida State, “Ponzi Schemes”
Ganesh Sitaraman, “We Must Prepare for an AI Bubble Now”
Michał Klincewicz et al., “Slopaganda: The interaction between propaganda and generative AI”
Kyle Chayka, “The Team Behind a Pro-Iran, Lego-Themed Viral-Video Campaign”
Week 29
Week 29
Week 28
Week 28
Independent Reading Selections (second half)
Week 27
Week 27
Independent Reading Selections (first half)
Weeks 25/26
Weeks 25/26
Does AI Have a Soul? Ethical AI, Palantir, Anthropic, and the US Government
Does AI Have a Soul? Ethical AI, Palantir, Anthropic, and the US Government
Berber Jin, “Meet the One Woman Anthropic Trusts to Teach AI Morals”
Image, “Should I Walk to the Car Wash?”
Matteo Wong, “Drink Whole Milk, Eat Red Meat, and Use ChatGPT”
Amrith Ramkumar, “Pentagon Used Anthropic’s Claude in Maduro Venezuela Raid”
Claude, “Claude’s Constitution”
Socrates, from Phaedrus on the soul
Various, Palantir Readings
Mona Khalil, “Palantir, Seemingly Everywhere All at Once”
Steven Hubbard, “ICE to Use ImmigrationOS by Palantir, a New AI System, to Track Immigrants’ Movements”
Alex Karp, “Letter to Shareholders February 2026”
Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “The Palantir Guide to Saving America’s Soul”
Week 23
Week 23
How Does it Work? The Basics of AI Functionality
How Does it Work? The Basics of AI Functionality
Janelle Shane, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place chapters 1-4
Ex Machina (2014) - in class
Week 22
Week 22
General Introduction to the Field’s Ethical Questions
General Introduction to the Field’s Ethical Questions
Sarah Roberts, “Your AI is a Human”
Michael Schrage, “Philosophy Eats AI”
Molly Smith, “Can Generative AI Chatbots Emulate Human Connection? A Relationship Science Perspective”
Meghan O’Gieblyn, “Do We Have Minds of Our Own?”
Kyle Chayka, “That New Hit Song on Spotify? It Was Made by A.I.”
John Cassidy, “The Dangerous Paradox of A.I. Abundance”
Harvard, “How Close Are You to the Way ChatGPT Thinks?”
Robert Capps, “AI Might Take Your Job. Here are 22 New Ones It Could Give You”
Sam Kriss, “Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?”
Bill Wasik, “A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally.”
Cindy Shan, “Does new 'Cognify' tech allow prisoners to complete years of social rehabilitation in minutes?”
Optional:
Ajay Agrawal, “Genius on Demand”
Olivia Guest et al., “Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies”
Independent Reading Project Selections
Independent Reading Project Selections
Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Kashmir Hill, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
Page updated
Report abuse