Should I (You?) Have a Seat at the AI Table?

By Jessika Foreshee

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.69732/TVGV3190

It was a Tuesday afternoon and I had just walked into a hot yoga class. The room was starting to fill up with fellow yogis, unrolling their mats and settling in. I had come to this class to unwind, breathe, and avoid thinking about work and emails. I came to make time for myself, embrace the present moment of human interaction and community, and recognize that the human body is strong and capable. 

I unrolled my mat, laid with my back flat on the ground, closed my eyes, and began to breathe. Letting go of the endless meetings I had had that day about artificial intelligence (AI) and whether parents needed to consent to teachers using it in online classrooms, I reflected on the conversations with my therapist about AI companion apps and the balance between human connection and the dystopian mindset of a sycophantic AI telling the end user what they want to hear. I had spent the day reading multiple books and research articles about AI-induced algorithmic trauma and oppression, a framework that I am building. It is the cumulative psychological harm produced by sustained exposure to AI systems that manipulate attention, exploit emotion, and encode cultural bias. This is done often without the person even realizing that it is happening. It shows up as attention dysregulation, identity disruption, and a quiet erosion of our capacity for honest human connection. 

I settled into my mat, found my breath, and let the hot air of the yoga room seep into my body. Trying to be present, I cleared my mind of my work day and sat still. But then I began to hear faint chatter amongst classmates: “I asked ChatGPT if hot yoga was more beneficial than not hot yoga,” one said. “Oh, did you ask ChatGPT or did you ask Claude, because I feel like Claude would have been more resourceful,” another responded. “Speaking of AI, did your students use it on their final exam? I gave my students a scantron, so that they would not cheat. I even heard that the valedictorian’s speech this year was entirely created with AI.”

I had come to a very physical space in which I thought I would be free from the pulsating energy of artificial intelligence – a space that I thought would disconnect me from the very components that I had been fixated on all day, all week – but I was mistaken. Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It is what everyone is talking about, and almost no one is asking the right questions about it.

And so what came to me on that yoga mat, the question I could not breathe away no matter how hard I tried, was not whether AI is dangerous, it was whether we are making the same mistake we always make: building first, and then asking what we broke second.

Like much of life, technology is a two-sided coin. The printing press sparked an era of literacy and a second wave of enlightenment. Industrialization brought a surge of ingenuity and entrepreneurship that reshaped what was scientifically and economically possible. And social media, whatever its costs, genuinely connected us as a society in ways that once felt impossible.

But every one of those advances has carried a shadow. The printing press also spread propaganda and slander. Industrialization came at the cost of child labor. Social media, as Dr. Sak Stein (The Attachment Economy Is Here. We’re Not Ready., 2026), argues, created the attention economy, which is leaving us with a loneliness epidemic, rising political polarization, and fractured attention spans.

It’s clear that there are potential harms that come with using technology. Historically we know this. Time and time again technology has been relentlessly used as a weapon for advancement. From the production of rifles and the colonization of various native groups, to the emergence of submarines, radar, and nuclear bombs, to cyber attacks, phishing scams, and identity fraud. Technology has not only been weaponized, but it is also a force to be reckoned with. 

Time and time again, it became a race. Which country could create the most effective, reliant, lethal and transportable weapon first? What factory production line would have the greatest output at the lowest cost? Who would make it to outer space, to the moon, to Mars, first? Which tech company would create a social media app that would capture their users’ attention faster, would have the best filters, and the best aesthetic appeal? Each group of people(s) that created, implemented, utilized, or encouraged the technology, moved at such a rapid rate, that in every circumstance the creators of the technology moved faster than the people conceptualizing its impact. The conversation never happened, but consequences still came forward. And yet here we are again. Racing. Building. Talking about what AI can do, while almost never discussing what it is doing to our children, our relationships, our sense of self, and our capacity to be human.

Yet even with the evidence of a cyclical history, where technology booms and the human race is left with a scar to heal from, the current people at the table of all things AI (policy, safety, etc.), are still engineers, computer scientists, investors, and policy makers. Those voices are necessary and their expertise is essential for the growth and evolution of AI systems, but they are asking a narrow set of questions that pertain to capability, efficiency, safety at the model level, and economic value. The questions they are not trained to ask are just as important: What does this do to a child’s developing brain? What happens to human connection when AI becomes the primary emotional support system? How does algorithmic bias reproduce cultural trauma in communities that are already marginalized? What does sustained exposure to a system designed to tell you what you want to hear do to your capacity for honest relationships?

There is still room at the table for the disciplines that can help answer those questions. The psychologists and therapists, who have made a career out of understanding trauma, attachment, identity development, and behavioral conditioning. The educators, who have been in the classroom and have seen first hand what these systems are doing to students’ attention, motivation, and sense of self, should also have a seat at the table. As should historians and sociologists, who can read the current moment against the pattern of every other technological disruption, and who understand how cultures are shaped by technology. We also need the advocates that will represent the communities that are most affected and least represented. And parents also deserve a seat at the table, as they are the ones who are navigating these questions in real time with their children.

By advocating for more seats at the table, as a society we are setting ourselves up for the growth of a technological system that would build something worth accelerating, something that encapsulates the frameworks and safeguards necessary for the communities living inside it right now, rather than causing further damage, and back-auditing after the fact. We would be able to flag patterns before the harm becomes irreversible and build clinical frameworks to respond to AI-related harm before the next crisis forces our hand.

The cost of the absence of these contributors is not theoretical. History is already being written without them at the table, and the results are already visible. Teachers worry about academic integrity, so they hand out scantrons. Essays that are being submitted across campuses that are voiceless, and are written from the nonexistent experience of an inanimate software, creating an artificial narrative that not only replaces the students’ voice, but their ability to reason  and argue. Students worldwide are using machine translation to complete foreign language assignments. They are summarizing texts, skipping the essential skill of reading comprehension, minimizing their vocabulary knowledge base, and more importantly taking away their own voice. The foundations of thinking are being slowly eroded away, and outsourced one AI generated paragraph at a time. Cross-sectional studies show a society more likely to turn to an AI bot for emotional support rather than close friends and family. A lawsuit (Character.AI lawsuit, 2024), alleging that an AI chatbot interaction contributed to the suicide of a teenage boy. I have come to call what is happening here Algorithmic Trauma: the cumulative psychological harm of sustained exposure to systems that manipulate attention, exploit emotion, and encode cultural bias. It is showing up in classrooms and therapy rooms, but it does not yet have a name most people recognize. However, it needs one.

This is not about slowing down progress. It is about mindfulness. It is about recognizing that the most powerful technology in human history deserves the full range of human wisdom applied to it, not just the technical kind. We are starting to see this. The UK’s Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) and California’s AADC is starting to address the concerns of considering potential harms to users before building/implementing a digital product, not after. Both of these frameworks were developed with input from child development experts, alongside engineers and policymakers. These are not perfect frameworks but they are proof that the conversation can be broader. 

My children, your children, our future children will inherit whatever we build right now. The students across the state, across the nation, worldwide even, are already living inside of it. The therapists I see, the ones you see, are already sitting across from clients whose distress is entangled with systems that have no clinical framework guiding them.

While you may have the preconceived belief that you need a policy title, a large social media presence, or a research grant to join this conversation, you don’t. You can start by auditing your own AI use and making it visible. This does not have to be anything too formal. You could track your AI usage on the notes of your phone for a few days, a week, etc., writing down what AI tool you utilized. What did it provide to you and what will you do differently in the future? Did you really need to ask Gemini what 10 x 12 was? Or was there another possible resource for the problem at hand? By keeping a record, you can then start to track any patterns that may show up. How much of your daily tasks are you outsourcing, what changes could be made to encourage your own cognitive ability and creative thinking, or maybe, could you have reached out to a colleague, mentor, friend, instead of the AI? This then starts the dialogue for awareness, which precedes change. The reflection and change needs to start with you, before you advocate for intentional AI usage in your classroom. 

In your classroom, put your AI policy on your syllabus in clear language and model the transparency you want from your students. Write the policy yourself, do not borrow it from a colleague, or a social media post – put it in your own words. Have an open conversation with your students about finding as well as advocating for their own voice. Speak to them about using AI as a tool for effectiveness but not for effortlessness. Explain to them that a policy is not just a boundary, but a teaching opportunity to understand the why behind the rule.

Build AI literacy directly into your curriculum and do it in the target language. Have the students engage, interact, and experiment with machine translation tools. Have the students translate the text themselves, and then have a machine translation do the same. Did the AI flatten any of the meaning? Was there cultural context that was lost in the machine translation? Have the students critique the AI’s output, or better yet, have the students write their own paragraph and ask the AI to translate it, and then critique that output. Activities such as these require the students to engage critically with language as a system, rather than just produce an output, while also encouraging exploration rather than avoidance. 

In your department and/or institution, you can bring those observations to your next department meeting and propose a shared AI policy for the AI technology being used/implemented on your campus, rather than wait for one to be handed down to you. Some examples include: Artificial Intelligence Policies: Guidelines and Considerations, Ethical Ed Tech).

You can also join your institution’s technology task force, or if there is not one established, you can help create one. These committees are relevant and rarely include teachers, and almost never include world language teachers. 

Beyond your campus, join organizations that are already discussing AI implementation, policy, and ethics. Engage in whatever way works for you, whether you choose to propose a session for ACTFL, your regional language association, IALLT, or CALICO, write an article about your lived experiences (maybe in The FLTMAG?), submit feedback, or start sharing others’ articles on your preferred media channels. Frameworks like the UK’s Age-Appropriate Design Code and California’s AADC exist because people outside the engineering room insisted on being heard.

This is not someone else’s problem to solve. It is ours.

The table where the future of AI is being decided is being set right now, and if the only people pulling up chairs are engineers and investors, the rest of us will spend the next generation living with what they built without us. Show up. Bring your expertise. Demand your seat. Not as a courtesy, but as a necessity.

AI disclosure: Minimal use of AI.