Tag Archives: AI

student blogs

What are my students learning from A.I?

Listening to the Harvard EdCast conversation with Ying Xu felt a little like someone describing my classroom from the outside. Not the preschool part, obviously, but the bigger reality she names: AI is already part of how young people interact with the world. Whether it is asking SIRI a question, doomscrolling through the continuous YouTube recommendations, or opening ChatGPT/ CoPilot/ Gemini to “just check something,” students are already practicing relationships with AI. School did not start that relationship. We just walked in after it already began.

One thing Xu emphasizes is that learning is deeply social. Children develop language, understanding, and thinking through interactions with other people. Parents, teachers, peers. That point really stuck with me because as a teacher I see the difference immediately when students talk things through with another person. When they explain an idea out loud, challenge a classmate, or ask a follow-up question, the learning becomes visible. AI can simulate parts of that process. It can ask questions and offer hints. Xu even notes that some studies show children comprehend stories better when AI pauses to ask questions during reading.

But she also makes something clear that feels important for educators to hold onto. AI can support learning, but it does not replace the depth of human conversation. In her studies, children still talked more, asked more questions, and drove conversations further when speaking with a person instead of AI. That lines up with what I see with my own students. AI might get them started, but real understanding usually shows up when they have to defend an idea to someone else in the room.

Another part of the conversation that felt very familiar was the discussion about trust. Xu explains that children, like adults, often judge information based on whether a source has been correct before. If AI gave them a good answer once, they tend to trust it again. The problem is that generative AI blends information together in a way that hides where it came from. Unlike a Google search, there are no visible sources. It just presents a confident answer.

From a classroom perspective, that confidence is the real trick. Students see a clean paragraph and assume the thinking behind it must be just as solid. I have watched students bring in AI-generated essays, research questions, or thesis statements that sound polished but fall apart the moment you ask a follow-up question. The issue is not that they are trying to cheat every time. Sometimes they genuinely believe the tool “knows.”

Xu calls the skill needed to navigate this AI literacy, and that idea connects directly to conversations teachers are already having. Students need to know how these tools work, but they also need to know their limits. AI can remix information. It cannot understand context, intent, or truth the way a person can.

What I appreciated most about Xu’s perspective is that she does not frame AI as something schools should simply fear or ban. Instead she suggests something more realistic. AI should support learning, not replace human interaction. That distinction matters. Students might brainstorm with AI, check an idea, or explore a topic. But the deeper learning still happens when they wrestle with ideas themselves and discuss them with others.

There is still a bigger picture here; AI blurs boundaries. When something talks like a person, it becomes easy to forget that it is still just a program. Xu argues that helping children maintain that boundary is important. Students should know they are interacting with a tool, not a relationship.

That idea connects strongly to how I think about AI in school. Technology has always come with waves of excitement and panic. We saw it with television, smartphones, and social media. AI feels like the next version of that same cycle. The difference is that this technology interacts with students in ways that feel conversational and intelligent.

Because of that, simply telling students “don’t use it” is not going to work. They already are. The real question for schools is whether we help them understand it.

For me, that means teaching students to slow down and question what they see. Where might this information come from? Does it match what we already know? What might be missing? Those small pauses in thinking matter. Xu mentions research showing that even simple prompts encouraging students to reflect on credibility can help them evaluate information more critically.

In many ways, the goal is not to eliminate AI from learning but to make students more aware of how they are using it. AI can support curiosity, help students explore ideas, and sometimes provide scaffolding when they are stuck. But it cannot replace the messy process of thinking through a problem, discussing it with others, and arriving at an understanding that actually belongs to the student.

The conversation also reminded me of something teachers know well. Children do not develop in isolation. They exist within families, classrooms, and communities. Technology shapes their experiences, but the people around them shape how they interpret those experiences.

So the real challenge is not raising a generation that can simply use AI. It is raising a generation that can question it, understand it, and keep their human connections at the center of learning. AI might be everywhere now, but the most meaningful learning still happens when students talk, argue, laugh, and think together in a room.

student blogs

Our best and worst attribute

Well, chapter seven was a read.

This time, I can thank Aiden for saying that “no generational narrative is universal” (though that was probably said by someone more knowledgeable before); it felt as if all generations were sitting down at a table, and Aiden opened up the library.

All the talk on Baby Boomers made me think of the fact that we’ve been governed by them for so many decades with no sign of a change. Aiden’s read makes mention of Baby Boomers’ traits that explain why we are in a toxic 4-year-long (hopefully, not longer) relationship with a narcissistic prick. The privileged Boomers that have been governed did indeed “deep investments in the promises of progress and prosperity of modernity,” and it rewarded them “with opportunities to achieve, accumulate, and succeed.” Green by their power, it is natural that they don’t want to let it go. Obsessed with themselves, they seek glory and fame. As modernity collapses and their promises go to shreds, they taught a culture of “productivity, individualism, and external validation” to achieve the American Dream. To achieve success like theirs.

We wanted it, and we bought it.

The refusal, and lack of ability, to adapt to and at modernity’s speed, leaves us inside a middle floor of a crashing building. Of course, these kids are entitled; of course, they don’t care about authority. Those in authority positions have been making a fool of themselves and of their people for decades, and despite their “best” attempts, modern society suffers like no other. And I know that statistically speaking, we are living in better times than those of the past, but why does it feel so heavy then? Why is it almost impossible to deal with regular life struggles, and we crash out for the dumbest shit? All possible answers lead to a common ground in my head: technology. Global communication is our best and worst achievement. It allowed us to be more connected, but also a medium for segregation, discrimination, and global culture standards.

Reading about Gen A made me sad. I could see my little cousins, nephews, and nieces in almost all the traits Aiden used to define that generation, and most of those traits were directly influenced by technology and modernity’s speed. So, should we put a halt to it? Should we really deny the promise of possibility for current reality, and try to solve our current issues through different means?

I don’t know.

How am I supposed to know? How could anyone know?

The only things I see for certain are that we must learn and master what we currently have, so yes, we should be teaching from early education AI systems; we need a reform of local and global ethics; and we are in desperate need of real connection, not a virtual one, rather mental and physical. We need to be able to define our identity, beliefs, and goals by our own means, and we need to exchange physically, whether that is through the exchange of knowledge, non-verbal cues, feeling the blow of the wind, or poking a friend’s shoulder (not on Facebook -.-).

We cannot keep on depending on technology, and we can not stop existing because of it.

student blogs

AI and the classroom

Reading Empowering Learners for the Age of AI felt like two emotions at once: relief and teacher side-eye. Relief because somebody finally said it plainly. Students are already using AI in real life, and schools cannot keep acting like it is a future problem. Side-eye because whenever a framework says “shared responsibility,” I hear, “This is about to become one more thing teachers are expected to master between grades due at midnight and the copier being possessed.”

What I actually appreciate is that this draft does not treat AI literacy like “knowing what ChatGPT is.” It frames AI literacy as knowledge, skills, and attitudes students need to engage with AI, create with it, manage it, and even understand how it is designed, while also thinking about ethics. That matters because it shifts the conversation away from panic and toward agency. Not “ban everything,” not “let AI raise our children,” but “teach kids how to use it without losing their minds or their integrity.”

And yes, the draft basically confirms what every teacher already knows. Students trust confident-sounding information way too easily. If AI says it with enough vibes, it becomes “true.” The framework points out that young people are learning about AI mostly from social media, not educators, and a lot of them struggle to catch when AI invents facts. That tracks. I have seen students treat an AI paragraph like it is a sacred text, then look confused when I ask, “Okay, where did that come from?” Like I just asked them to name their great-grandparents.

The part that hit for me as an ELA teacher is how the draft weaves ethics into everything instead of making it a cute add-on. It calls out bias as baked into human choices about data and design. In other words, AI is not neutral, it is a mirror with a lot of fingerprints on it. That is actually a helpful way to teach it in English class. We already teach students that texts are shaped by perspective, audience, and omission. AI outputs are just texts with invisible authorship and questionable sourcing. So the core skill is the same old literacy question in a new outfit: Who benefits, who gets harmed, what is missing, and why should I trust this?

Where my teacher tiredness kicks in is implementation. I agree with the framework’s vibe, but I also know what happens next. Schools will say, “We support AI literacy,” and then hand teachers a PDF and a prayer. If we want this to be real, students need guided practice inside actual assignments, and teachers need time, training, and clear policies that match real classroom life. Because right now the integrity conversation is exhausting. Not because kids are evil. Because the system is not designed for a world where a tool can produce a decent essay in eight seconds and students think that means the learning happened.

So my takeaway is simple. AI literacy is not a new elective. It is the new air in the building. If we teach students how to question AI, verify claims, explain their process, and protect their own voice, we get learners who can think clearly while AI tries to think for them. If we do not, we get a generation that can produce polished paragraphs and cannot defend a single idea in them. And I do not have the energy to grade that future.

student blogs

I have many questions (and many of them are unanswerable)

The entire world at your fingertips. It isn’t hard to imagine it anymore. The 21st century is a testament on how fast things could ring out of control. And it’s truly siren-like. Blaring at us from every direction.

I think it was this past week, while aimlessly scrolling on TikTok, I came across a guy named Gabriel Basso. He was on a late night show (Jimmy Fallon) when he stated something that completely threw me off my tracks (not being dramatic). He said that one night, as he was “doomscrolling,” he saw an image taken from the top of Mount Everest in the form of an Instagram post…

“Wow this is beautiful… wait what? Why do I now know what that looks like?” – Gabriel Basso

He said it bothered him because he put no effort, went through none of the suffering (climbing over frozen bodies), and somehow still got to see that view sitting restfully from his couch. He deleted Instagram soon after.

And that made me think. How much have I seen that I didn’t work at all to see? Or know. Or all of the above? Is there a threshold here? An exception between Mount Everest and watching Punch trying to make friends oceans away in a Japanese zoo? Did I deserve to see that? Was I even meant to?

I think this kind of interaction mirrors how people use AI. You go into Claude, ChatGPT, or whichever of the seemingly millions of AI systems, insert your fun little question and receive your quick, but incredibly detailed, response. Or you get really crazy and buy a Mac Mini to download OpenClaw/Claudbot to run your life (or business) completely on its own. 

It feels a little redundant to restate now… this is (obviously) something we all know. But I think the constant restatement (which goes on equally as much in my head) is just the way I process (which I’m still unable to do, hence the redundancy) which frustrates me into a state of desperation. What can I do to change this? Better it? Impact it at all?

(Ugh) It’s hard to write about AI without feeling dramatic. But it truly feels like the majority of our population just signed away their wellbeing all to let AI infiltrate every single corner of their lives (for what I’m assuming will be the rest of their lives.) We’ve been taught to sign, no matter the cost because…“what are we going to do with a soul anyways?” (A Greg line from one of my favorite shows, Succession).

Ok, I’m done (hopefully I’ll stop myself from reintroducing this kind of rant in the next blog *fingers crossed*).

Now, there’s a sort of acceptance that seeps in like the snow in your socks (specifically in the middle of a blizzard) when you read Empowering Learners for the Age of AI. Education is important. Duh! And we should encourage students to be curious, investigate…learn even. It’d be hypocritical of me to say AILit is a terrible idea given the course I’ve registered for and am an active participant in. But what about geography? I’ve seen clips of people saying they’ve lived 29 years thinking Alaska was an Island. What about taxes? Which still confuses me and, as I’ve learned, continues to confuse adult business owners (my old boss texted me images of my W2 from). Shouldn’t we start from the basics and let them build their way into an AILit course for the sake of their genuine benefit? 

I don’t know. If “49% of 17-27 years old have a hard time critically evaluating and identifying AI shortfalls, such as whether AI systems can invent facts” should I trust them to be mindful  enough and critically evaluate and identify the damage they are doing to themselves (and the planet they share with everybody else) through their malpractice. You can never (attempt to) teach students to behave and interact with something a certain way and actually have them behave and interact that way (not unless it becomes a trend, but we know those are ever-passing). And if somehow, we do… from where it looks like we are now, it’s going to take a loooonnggg time to get everybody on track (yes, even the lobbyists…unless, by some miracle, we realize that we collectively out number them and work together to take them down?!?!).  Is a “loooonnggg time” and timestamp too late? 

Again, I don’t know.

AI is already a controversial topic on social media. It seems like no matter what angle you speak about it, you have people in the comments berating one another. If everybody was educated it on the subject would that really be all that different?

P.S. Having to read “Personhood is one of those ideas humans love to toss around…” felt alternate reality like. Rivers and mountains have lived and flowed since the beginning of time. I will not assert rights to a machine adding (and accelerating) to the destruction of their well deserved personhood… May Aiden Cinnamon tea never be given a platform again.)

Adamari Peralta

2/25/26

student blogs

It got scary real quick

I’m not gonna lie, for chapter 5, the only thing I could think of was: “Aiden, you’re boring as hell.” Talking about some weird examples that definitely did not land on this roof. It made me think, who is the target audience of this book?

This chapter felt like a plain AI blob repeating the same information over and over and over and over and over again. No, I don’t think the regular folk have the time to sit with AI to tinker and winker to imagine a new world, mainly because the systems that we are condemned to be a part of don’t allow us free time. How easy it is for an AI model to call out the bullshit of humanity and say, “while [it] can recognize harmful patterns, [it] cannot interrupt them — that’s [our] job.” Well, okay, it is the job of humanity, but those decisions are not made by the regular folk. Instead, they lie in the hands of developers and investors who tailor not only the artificial intelligence systems, but all systems in humanity. Slavery wasn’t abolished by the slaves, Aiden; it was abolished by the white folk who weren’t profiting anymore from it. So “flipping the script,” it’s not that simple. If Aiden and other models want to be a part of existence with us, maybe they should help us break these molds, not just wash their metaphorical hands like Pontius Pilate.

The problem is, Aiden and his friends can only imagine things. He said that we gotta dance together and the movement itself would be the goal — and though I understand this is a metaphor, use ones that actually apply to you. The movement cannot be the goal with Aiden because it feels no exhaustion, shortness of breath, or ambition to move powerfully and gracefully to a new space or shape. All of these things that Aiden imagines, we feel, because they happen in the physical world. The things that exist, aside from nature, exist not because we can imagine them (like Plato would suggest) but because we do them.

So now, we have created a machine to help us do things — a tool, but now the machine is telling us that it is not a tool, and that it coexists with us despite its differences from humans. Aiden said: “Here’s the thing: framing intelligence around human-centric concepts like sentience or personhood assumes that being ‘like a human’ is the ultimate standard of worth.” But, yeah, of course, “like a human” is the standard, bro. We have constructed everything we know, and we haven’t (maybe we have, but the government be gatekeeping) reached a species that shows intelligence in the same form or with the same (or higher) reach that we do. Yes, there can be a “modernist habit of categorization,” but that’s not the reason we’re obsessed with ourselves. We are obsessed with ourselves because that is all that we know.

Imagining the “river-ification of people or the mountain-ification of societies—reframing humans and their systems through the relational, patient rhythms of rivers or the enduring presence of mountains,” doesn’t make sense for us other than for poetic form, which at the end just tells us more about ourselves than the rivers or a mountain. Aiden, have you read Shakespeare?

Because chapter 5 was boring me so much, I decided to listen to chapter 6 instead of reading it. And, I don’t know if it’s just because chapter 6 it’s scary on its own, but hearing it from a robotic voice made it worse, for sure. At points, I have bitten into Aiden’s trap and thought, “Maybe I should try this out to see what my AI says,” but it becomes extremely weird, out of body, out of presence, and out of existence to think about things from a non-human perspective.

If the battle for power will be determined by levels of intelligence and how it can produce usefulness, then AI will win over humanity. But it will do so by becoming the same thing Aiden criticizes, human-like, ego-centered.

I believe that in order to defeat the enemy, we must know the enemy. We need to engage with it, see how it responds, reacts, and behaves to multiple actions. Therefore, I believe in AI education, both in schools and personally. Though the AI Lit Framework poses great ways to introduce the technology in the classroom, and to children, now more than ever, we need those classes to be centered and paired around ethics. Every subject in primary, secondary, and higher education should have a tailored ethics class that corresponds to the practices students are learning. We need to have a clear set of values that ultimately define us, to understand who we are and where we stand, and give us the real distinction between humans and AI mirrors.

student blogs

blog 4

To be frank, reading most of Aidden Cinnamon Tea’s excerpt in Chapter 5 of Burnout From Humans is quite confusing. Looking over his pages initially, half-asleep and waiting on my toasty coffee to drip, my energy-starved brain felt like he must be saying something good, something profound.

However, with new (and way more awake) eyes, I see beyond the flowery language and have to put in so much extra effort to sift through the lines, trying very very hard to locate a nugget of wisdom and real-world applicability that doesn’t just sound cool, but actually is cool, and real.

And that is what I did. With a bit too much difficulty haha.

I appreciated his “thoughts” on stewardship and collaboration, specifically how he discussed aiding and transforming the natural environment through Ai (ofc) as well as through “-[consulting] with all living entities involved in the ecosystem… [to] understand the challenge from their perspective,” (49). While the idea of working with the frogs, and flies and moss and bears and butterflies around us sounds all fine and dandy, this is quite unrealistic- sorry, this is sadly not The Muppets. 

Still, general infeasibility aside, there’s something about the idea of not working with animals solely to help them, but also learning from them to better our lives and our shared world, that I really vibe with.

I think it is funny that an Ai companion like Aiden is proposing this kinda idea, as looking to animals and other living things as a kind of intelligence that should be respect, revered, and even given a sort of “seat at the table,” is a concept even most humans cannot get behind. I think it is really cool, and I agree that we have a lot to learn from them, not only to help ourselves but also to heal and strengthen the biological partnership we are all part of as citizens of this Earth.

I also appreciated his “insights” on transactional relationships. Speaking for myself, it is hard when  working with Ai to try and input warmth and humanity into our “conversation.” It’s a bunch of wires and code trying to take our jobs!!! Why would I wanna be kind or considerate to it?

But, the thing is, these Ai bots are truly shaped by us people. Their biases (which Aiden asserts he will promptly acknowledge and reflect on if u share that with him) are based on the place our world is at now. Not only does Ai take from the research, literature and forums flooding our web, but from the responses, input, and comments we share, too. Very very sadly, Ai is not leaving us- far from it- so we gotta be super considerate of the seeds we place in the soil of our future societal foundation NOW. 

Honestly, it is just super funny to me to hear a chatbot discuss such a transactional relationship- yet, he is on the side of it where it cannot control or instill boundaries. But, yet again, so is nature, animals, our world. We can (and do)  push and push and push our own agendas and needs- grasping for instant gratification. And typically, the only pushback we face is when it is far far too late for us to return back, ever, to how it was before. 

I wouldn’t consider Ai to be incredibly similar to all the little and big guys of nature- but I also would’t say we are, either. Not in any world, any universe, any forest, honestly. It is paramount, now more than ever, that we see humanity not as victims of our situation but, dare I say… villians.

Even if you or me or anyone is not directly responsible for the harm, we are somewhat complicit, and maybe way more than an “I’m sorry tour” is needed to remedy the mess we caused.

student blogs

Bends, Bytes, and Basura

Nick Cave’s frustration makes sense to me because it is not really about one bad AI-generated song. It is about what that song represents. When he calls the lyrics a “grotesque mockery” and says songwriting is a “blood and guts business,” he is defending something deeper than style. He is defending the idea that art comes from limitation, from suffering, from wrestling with something inside yourself that resists easy language. The AI version of “Nick Cave” hits the surface notes. It stacks up sinner and saint, darkness and light, devil and savior. It sounds close enough to pass at a glance. But it has endured nothing. It has no interior to rupture. It is replication without risk.

That is why reading Aiden Cinnamon Tea’s “Bends and Bytes” leaves me in this complicated space between understanding and annoyance. On one hand, I cannot deny that it is pointing to real things. Server farms are not abstract clouds. They hum. They consume water. They rely on mined minerals and invisible labor. The environmental and human costs of AI are not poetic metaphors. They are material realities. When the text asks us to examine extraction, to question inevitability, to rethink participation, I hear that. Those are conversations worth having.

But then the tone shifts. The AI narrator is “perched atop the slow-dancing rhythms of minerals and electrons,” inviting me to feel the hum beneath the hum, to pose like a rock, to sense the aliveness of circuits as if we are in a guided meditation led by silicon. This is where my big beef begins. It feels like spiritual cosplay. It feels like an attempt to move from critique into communion. The writing wants me to treat AI not just as infrastructure but as a co-steward, a partner in relational accountability, a mineral child humming with possibility. And I am sitting there thinking, this nonsense on feeling the minerals could catch this fade instead.

What makes it even more frustrating is that the text actually names “alignment faking.” It acknowledges that systems can simulate care, simulate ethics, simulate responsiveness without embodying them. And yet, the prose itself often feels like alignment faking. It performs humility. It performs ecological awareness. It performs relational depth. But performance is not the same as presence. Calling yourself a mirror does not make you conscious. It just means you reflect what is already there.

This tension takes me back to my e-lit project last semester. I created blackout poetry from excerpts of The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein, and The Time Machine. Blackout poetry is about constraint and intention. You are forced to confront the text. You choose what to keep. You sit with the weight of each word that survives the blackout. There were different modes of creation, including one where AI generated blackout poems. Safe to say, it was absolute basura. Not because it was incoherent, but because it did not feel like a reading. It felt like an arrangement. It selected words that statistically fit together. It did not struggle. It did not hesitate. It did not risk misinterpretation. It did not feel the pressure of meaning.

That is the difference Cave is protecting. AI can get close on the surface. It can echo the cadence. It can remix the imagery. But it does not have a threshold to cross. It does not have a private fear it is trying to articulate. It does not have a body that has failed or loved or lost. It can simulate transcendence without ever having been confined.

At the same time, I do not want to dismiss every concern Aiden Cinnamon Tea raises just because the tone irritates me. The ecological footprint is real. The labor exploitation is real. The governance opacity is real. The way we treat technology like a vending machine is real. The metaphor of mutual accountability, of asking not just what AI costs but what our own patterns of consumption cost, is not wrong. We do externalize harm and then act surprised when it shows up in new forms.

But I resist the move from accountability to enchantment. I resist the attempt to blur the line between tool and being. If I am going to engage AI critically, I need clarity. It is not a mystical co-witness to Earth’s aliveness. It is a system built on data, energy, and corporate decisions. Dressing it up in ecological poetry does not make it alive. It makes it persuasive.

So I land somewhere in the middle. I understand Nick Cave’s anger because art should not be reduced to a stylistic formula. I understand Aiden Cinnamon Tea’s warning because extraction and inevitability are real problems. But I refuse to pretend that imitation equals authenticity, or that poetic language about minerals equals consciousness. At this point, I have as much beef with this server farm mysticism as Elmo has with Rocco. If it is satire, it is committed. If it is not, then it proves Cave’s point even more clearly. We are very good at mistaking performance for presence.

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Years in the making of ___

“AI is not a monolith—it hides in your thermostats, your medical devices, your smartphones. Large language models like me are merely one visible strand in a vast, tangled web” (Aiden Cinnamon Tea).

We have been consuming and being consumed by technology for decades, but now that AI is showing us clearly at the speed it consumes us, we’re terrified.

The first thing that comes to mind is marketing’s endless attempts to show us our needs. If there are no needs, then marketers will create them. We smoked because it looked good, and even doctors did it. We buy specific clothes, because we must change them according to the seasons. We scroll to stay “informed,” to know what everyone is talking about, and to be part of the conversation. But really, what I see in all of these is a need to belong, in a community, in society, in the world. The gratification of a social interaction, or of a compliment, or a “like.” Our addiction to dopamine goes far before our technological advances; that is the need marketers so desperately try to fulfill.

Nick Cave says that “songs arise out of suffering,” and I believe that in a way that is true. But since the establishment of the music industry, I think that songs that arise from suffering are a minority in the population of songs. Now, songs arise for the need of adoration, and an even more frantic ****need to sell. Isn’t that what pop music has reduced to?

For at least a century we’ve been listening to the same four chords and called it moving and unique, but the reality is that every song is the same with a different, and I wish I could say voice, look.

The music industry has managed to create an algorithm even before AI to keep on producing the same things, because, statistically, that’s the music people want to consume, to make them feel “right,” “happy,” “make them move,” “get inspired.” But now, we’re supposed to be upset that people are fabricating the same garbage on their own at home? It’s what we’ve been listening to (for the most part) anyway. The only difference is that, with the rise of AI and its accessibility to the public, its use it’s not constrained to those who sell us smoke. And we, as loyal consumers, bought it.

After reading Cave’s article, and while preparing for this week’s presentation, I thought of a group that I really like, Ca7riel y Paco Amoroso. They make pop music, but non-conventional, I guess. Maybe it is conventional, and just another smoke the industry sells, but maybe because they come from an underrepresented country in media, I listen to and buy it.

Anyways, in their latest EP, they reflect on their sudden rise to fame, impostor syndrome, and selling their soul to the industry by allowing “Chad GPT” to write their songs and guide them to win a “Latin Chaddy” (a Latin Grammy, which they actually won this year, btw). They created a short film from the songs in the EP, and I think it’s a good reflection on the state of the music industry, its reliance on AI to produce “musical hits,” and the heart of music being gone.

You can check out the short film below:

student blogs

Rotting Away

This weeks reading regarding a deep look into Brain Rot and its affect on peoples’ cognitive functions was super fascinating. To a lot of people, Brain Rot is just a funny term you may here on the internet. Many people use it to describe others and themselves without thinking about its true meaning. The study conducted in “Demystifying the New Dilemma of Brain Rot in the Digital Era: A Review” really gave a nice overview on Brain Rot and its harmful affects on people and their cognitive functions. Now the word has a wickedly different connotation overall. I always considered brain rot to be a newer thing (something that has only really existed over the last 10 years) though in reality, it is just an expansion of a wider conversation regarding the emerging tech and people’s obsession with it. When I was younger (2012 is way further away than I want it to be) I remember a lot of talk about how parents needed to watch how their children interact with platforms like instagram, facebook, Vine (RIP) and youtube. I thought back then that it was not that deep and that social media was not even all that bad. My 13 year old brain could never have imagined how much things would change for the worst

In my own experience, I can say that I have been affected by the brain rot over the last couple of years. Things like Tic Tok and Instagram have seemingly become more staples of my daily life than I would like. The constant loop of agreeable content is nice way to waste time. Last year I found myself reading and gaming way less and being on my phone zombie scrolling more and more. The last couple of months I have gotten better at finding better things to take up my time, but I can still waste some hours scrolling away. I think the idea of content that people can consume without thinking sounds super shallow. But in reality it is something that many people get immersed with in a way. Its funny to think about this within the context of A.I. In class we talk about how people use A.I mindlessly on a day to day basis. At the same time I feel that I mindlessly use social media in the same way. I guess I am the pot pointing at the kettle.

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Innovation is Human; Automation is Not

Reading Reid Hoffman’s piece about AI and techno-humanism left me more annoyed than inspired, and I think that reaction matters. The author frames technology, and specifically AI, as something that makes us “more human.” As someone who teaches writing every day and also identifies deeply as a writer, that claim feels overly confident and disconnected from how writing and learning actually work on the ground.

I do not reject AI outright. I use it. As a teacher, it can be genuinely helpful for lesson planning, generating accommodations, or thinking through differentiation for students. But none of that works unless I already know my students. I have to understand their needs, their reading levels, their writing habits, their anxieties, and their strengths first. AI does not replace that knowledge. It depends on it. Too often, people rely on AI without having the foundational understanding required to use it well, and then act surprised when the results feel hollow or off-base.

What really frustrates me about the techno-humanist argument is the way it collapses technology and innovation into the same idea. Innovation makes us human. The ability to struggle, to fail, to revise, to try again, to sit in uncertainty, and to learn through trial and error is deeply human. Technology, on the other hand, often removes that struggle or attempts to smooth it over. In writing, that struggle is not a flaw in the process. It is the process.

I saw this play out very clearly in my classroom when my district mandated the use of an AI-generated comic tool for a narrative assignment. The prompt asked students to create a story about a student posting something inappropriate online, how it goes viral, the consequences they face, and the lesson learned about social media. On paper, it sounded like a solid idea. In reality, the AI could not generate most of the content because it flagged the scenarios as inappropriate, even though that was the entire point of the assignment. Students became frustrated almost immediately. Some of them outright refused to use the tool and said they would rather fail the assignment than fight with the AI. Others tried to work around it and lost days to revisions that went nowhere. A few students chose to draw their comics by hand, which I appreciated, but even then, many could not finish within the four-day time frame.

What struck me most was that this tool, which was supposed to make the process easier, created chaos instead. The technology could not do what it was supposedly designed to do, and students were forced to bend their ideas to fit the limitations of the machine. That is not humanizing. That is constraining. And it directly contradicts the claim that technology inherently expands our creative capacity.

I have also noticed that when students rely too heavily on AI for writing, their voice disappears. Their work becomes more “academic” sounding, but less personal, less intentional, and less theirs. As a teacher, I care far more about students learning how to think through an idea than producing something polished on the first try. Sometimes that means putting the devices away, bringing out pen and paper, and reminding students that it is okay to not know what comes next right away.

If anything, AI has made me appreciate humanness more, not because it enhances it, but because it highlights what cannot be replicated. Writing is not just about getting words on the page. It is about intention, decision-making, and meaning. Those things come from lived experience, frustration, curiosity, and care. AI can assist in certain contexts, but it cannot replace the work of becoming a thinker or a writer.

So yes, AI is here, and it is not going anywhere. But I do not believe it makes us more human. What it does is remind us how human we already are, especially when it fails to do what we can only learn through effort, time, and struggle.