First Year Forum: AI and Social Media

Social media shaped how a generation communicates, learns, and understands what is true. Artificial intelligence is now changing that environment again: deciding what we see, generating what looks real, and making it easier to create and spread information at scale.

In this First Year Forum workshop, we will examine the connection between AI and social media through familiar examples: recommendation feeds, AI-generated images and video, bots, targeted advertising, and the changing nature of online attention. We will ask what these tools make easier, what they make harder, and how we might recognize their influence on our own habits.

No technical background is required. Students should come prepared to discuss a recent encounter with AI or social media that made them pause, question, or look twice.