e-Edition
Sign up for email newsletters
Sign up for email newsletters
e-Edition
Trending:
APTOS — When Josephine McGinty, “Jo” for short, is preparing to embark on a new writing project, she doesn’t put pen to paper right away. The 17-year-old Delta High School senior begins with a good old-fashioned brainstorm session to unearth her many creative ideas. Then, she adds a modern twist.
As she allows these ideas to run wild, McGinty often creates far-fetched worlds or circumstances and she finds it sometimes useful to employ artificial intelligence programs, such as large language models, to assist her with hyper-specific or obscure research. After all, how else would one know the required daily water rations needed to sustain 1,000 passengers aboard a cruise ship cast adrift?
McGinty often settles on ideas that place her fictional protagonists in surreal settings and challenges them to confront an antagonist who is seeking to brainwash the other characters by ensnaring them in cyclical experiments with obstacles that must be overcome, again and again. If the main character fails, they may end up perpetuating the very system that has trapped them instead of turning it into something positive or useful. Think “Groundhog Day,” with a dystopian flavor.
Perhaps all of this is why McGinty has developed a keen interest in AI and is among a small group of local students who have taken on leadership roles in advocating for policies at the county and state level that could allow the burgeoning technology to be harnessed for good.
“It’s not sentient. It’s not something that can decide to be good or bad in and of itself. It kind of just depends on who the user is and who the company who manufactured it is,” McGinty said in a recent interview with the Sentinel. “I have a mixed opinion of it.”
McGinty, who will receive her diploma June 6 from the alternative education school hosted on the Cabrillo College campus, is one of five members of the Santa Cruz County Office of Education’s Youth Empowerment through Technology and Innovation group, or YETI. Under the guidance of county staff, the group of high school students has met once per week since October to study the use of AI among their peers and teachers and to devise strategies to foster responsible technology usage, promote digital literacy and encourage innovative solutions to real-world challenges.
One major initiative the group has already spearheaded is a survey that went out to students across the Mid and North County regions that was designed to collect feedback about general AI opinions, possible uses of AI and its benefits and drawbacks. While the survey is ongoing, McGinty said most respondents so far have voiced a negative opinion of the futuristic technology and cited frustrations about environmental impacts, a strong distaste for AI-generated artwork and concerns about “cognitive offloading,” or an over-reliance on various programs to think and problem-solve for them.
“A lot of them (students), understandably, feel like AI is taking away from creativity and critical thinking,” said McGinty. “I do overhear a lot. How people are like, ‘Oh, AI is so awful and it’s taking all the water and it’s doing all these image generations that are taking away from artists actually drawing.’”
McGinty said she understands and even agrees with a lot of the criticism she hears, but she still believes that AI can be a net benefit in an educational context if it’s used ethically and in the appropriate setting. However, the negativity surrounding the technology has created stigma and she fears that dynamic too often stifles healthy dialogue.
“I agree with a lot of those criticisms, but I feel like sometimes it’s overly negative and a little shaming toward students who don’t use it in unethical ways,” she said.
But instead of shying away from the issue, this tension has only caused McGinty to lean in harder, believing that appropriate public policy can help change the narrative. McGinty has appeared at several technology conferences across the state to speak about her experiences with AI and to meet with policymakers and their staff to advocate for creation of effective guardrails.
One proposal that McGinty and her peers are developing is a rubric that teachers can use to define what level of AI use is appropriate for each assignment or class. For instance, a Level 1 assignment would mean use of AI is not permitted, Level 3 means the technology can be used in the drafting process and Level 5 means AI can act as a co-creator.
The county’s youth technology group is also working to create an AI bill of rights, which would outline inherent protections and freedoms all students using AI are entitled to such as data protection and buffers against cognitive offloading.
Stephanie Sumarna is the county Office of Education’s EdTech and Innovation Teacher on Special Assignment who helped form the youth leadership group and has worked extensively with McGinty. She said fears about cheating students is the elephant in the room when conversations about AI come up among parents, teachers and adults in general. But in her experience, students have a more nuanced view of AI than they are given credit for.
“They see that adults are using it and that it can support adults in their work and they’re curious how they can also do that to support their own learning, but there haven’t been very many clear examples of how to do that yet,” said Sumarna. “They are hungry to understand that.”
And youth leaders like McGinty can help facilitate that understanding, Sumarna added. In addition to her inquisitive mind and knack for clearly articulating her ideas, Sumarna admires McGinty for her bravery. She recalled that McGinty recently appeared as a student panelist at a high-profile learning conference to openly share how she uses AI to assist in her studies despite the possibility that it would attract heavy scrutiny.
“She has been so vulnerable in sharing ways that she has used AI to overcome challenges she’s faced in her own learning journey,” said Sumarna. “Having the bravery and courage to share how an emergent tool is supporting you while also being aware that there’s mixed feelings about that tool; I just think that is so courageous of her. I don’t think I would have had that same ability when I was in high school.”
But for those who are privy to McGinty’s reading habits, that bravery and incisive intellect comes as no surprise. McGinty’s favorite author is George Orwell whose landmark novel “1984” depicted a fictional dystopia where citizens are brutally oppressed by the government and language becomes monochromatic and meaningless.
Asked if she thought Orwell would approve of the AI products on the market today, McGinty replied with a laugh, “He would probably dislike it a lot.”
But Orwell was also a prolific nonfiction writer whose unflinching essays on politics and writing challenged the leaders of his day. As a writer, McGinty plans to further explore this tradition by studying communications at Cabrillo College next school year. Her fascination with Orwell initially steered her toward an interest in journalism, but she said her recent experiences interacting with the people actually developing policy in Sacramento has inspired her to explore the issues important to her from the inside.
“I just want to work with the intersection between policy, activism, politics and communications,” she said.
That might look like a public information officer, policy analyst, added McGinty, or even a lobbyist.
“But in an ethical, good way,” she said. “Not, like, an evil way.”
Copyright 2026 Santa Cruz Sentinel. All rights reserved. The use of any content on this website for the purpose of training artificial intelligence systems, algorithms, machine learning models, text and data mining, or similar use is strictly prohibited without explicit written consent.
Leave a Reply