To open the Humans First conference, Mike Burns hands the mic to three Marist students — Bethel Abera, Max Linenberg, and Evan Stallings — for an unscripted conversation about what "humans first" means to them and how they actually experience AI in their daily lives, with no agenda set in advance.

Bethel reflects on empathy, uncertainty, and resisting a life reduced to grades and resumes, then speaks candidly about losing her love of writing after becoming reliant on AI in eighth and ninth grade — and regaining her confidence since stepping back from it. Max, a self-taught AI power user with a growing YouTube presence, argues AI has expanded rather than limited his creativity — from building a swim-times tracking website to producing a professional ad for a marketing class — while admitting he's not immune to overdependence himself, and challenges teachers to bring AI into the classroom as a creative tool rather than treating it purely as a cheating risk. Evan brings the conversation back to consequences beyond the classroom, citing the water and environmental costs of AI data centers and warning that passive AI use is eroding critical thinking, using AP exam review sessions as an example.

The three find common ground on the same worry: that leaning on AI to skip the hard parts of learning risks producing a generation without the skills — in writing, thinking, and problem-solving — that the world will still need from them.

Recorded live at the Humans First conference, Marist School, July 2026. Produced by Nic Hoffmann for Marist Podcasting. This podcast series is created with support from ⁠DELTA⁠ at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focused on human formation in the age of AI.

The theme is "Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.