Banner image design: Alyssa Monte
DESIGN JUSTICE LABS
STUDENTS
If you are a student interested in learning more about “AI,” or an educator teaching critical AI literacies, please begin by downloading our Student Guide to Critical AI Literacies. For a deeper dive, check out our collectively authored living document, “Teaching Critical AI Literacies.”
Why cultivate critical AI literacies from a Design Justice Labs approach?
- Student research is important to cultivating critical AI literacies. Instead of approaching AI tools as users, students can engage products like ChatGPT as researchers by assessing their strengths, weaknesses and limitations through experiments of their own design.
- The approach emphasizes a student’s empowered ability to
- understand how generative AI works;
- evaluate a technology’s known harms, social impacts, and tradeoffs; and
- make independent judgements about how, when, or whether to use an AI tool in a particular circumstance.
Below we proudly share the work of undergraduate student researchers at Rutgers and elsewhere. We will add to these examples on an ongoing basis. To submit student research for peer-review and potential publication write to critcicalai@sas.rutgers.edu.
We also welcome teachers to submit their project-based assignments for our teachers page.
Jesse Kogge / Photograph from Codesign + Class Solidarity / CC BY-NC-SA
CODESIGN + CLASS SOLIDARITY
Objects Born of Collaborative Design and Knowledge Sharing
Indiana University undergrad (class of 2026) Jesse Kogge explores the codesign process in Max Fertik’s 2025 capstone course.
As temperatures dropped each passing week, Kogge collaborated directly with unhoused individuals to devise a new means of staying warm in extreme cold-weather conditions. His thoughtful documentation of this process and openly critical reflection underscores how students can authentically pursue design justice principles in their work.
Maronzio Vance / The Brick Wall "Talks Politics" / Still from YouTube video (2010)
WRITING WITH “AI PARTNERS”
The Perspective of an Aspiring Novelist
In this report, Rutgers student and aspiring novelist Landen Gonzalez shares his experience using generative AI as a writing partner, examining where chatbots can support the writing process and where they fall short.
Gloria Mendoza / The Environmental Impact of Data Centers in Vulnerable Ecosystems / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0
FROM SUBPRIME TO AI
How Chatbots Analyze Economic Bubbles
In this report, Rutgers student Sarah Paul compares how three AI chatbots analyze economic narratives surrounding the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and current AI investment. The report derives from her final project for "Data and Culture" in Fall 2025.
Bart Fish & Power Tools of AI / Brain Control II / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0
THE UNSPOKEN CAUSE (AND SOLUTIONS)
To Our AI Problems
In this report, Critical AI @ Rutgers summer 2026 intern Anthony Mannino argues that students’ reliance on AI reflects a larger problem within education. Originally published as an opinion piece in The Amherst Student, this essay is reposted here.
Pauline Wee & DAIR / Firehose II / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0
COLLEGE STUDENTS AND GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Is it Helping or Hurting Them?
In this essay, Nicole Gasbarro, an English major at Rutgers, shares what she learned from fellow students using generative AI. The essay derives from her final project for "Data and Culture" in Fall 2025.
Yutong Liu & Kingston School of Art / Talking to AI 2.0 / Image: Licenced by CC-BY 4.0
THE PROBLEM WITH ANTHROPOMORPHIZING AI
In this essay Hannah Arbeitel, now pursuing her Masters of Information at Rutgers with a concentration in Library and Information Science, began this research on anthropomorphizing language for the course “Design Justice AI: An Approach to Media Theory” as an English major in 2024.
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, "Frau vor der untergehenden Sonne" Museum Folkwang (1920)
WHO PAYS FOR AI?
In this project, Design Justice Labs S25 Fellow Lexi Tassone investigates the environmental toll of AI, showing how data-center pollution and resources used burden vulnerable communities. Her project highlights the hidden costs of generative AI and raises critical questions about environmental justice.
Image: Hiragla Variation I, Frank Stella, 1969.LACMA Modern Art Collection, © Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS) NY
THE PROBLEM OF MITIGATING BIAS
Uncovering Unexpected Disparities in AI-Mediated Hiring Practices
In this report, Design Justice Labs S25 Fellow Jay Rana presents his findings from an audit of GPT-4.1: "Instead of simply replicating societal bias, GPT-4.1’s behavior suggests a deliberate shift, but one that still merits close examination as a model-specific outcome."
Image: Hall of Quiet Study, anonymous, Chinese watercolor, 19cMetropolitan Museum of Art (ca. 1828)
A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
In this study, Design Justice Labs S25 Fellow Shraddha Rahul presents their findings from interviews about ChatGPT in the academic lives of university students: "As developers of generative AI set out to challenge how we define concepts of originality, students are seeking clarity. They want to uphold academic integrity and authentic work, not abandon these values."
Image: Paul Claudel, Audrey Parr, Darius Milhaud, and Hélène Hoppenot, L'Homme et son désir; poeme plastique (1917)
DEFINING THE MAGIC
As Rayzel Fine and Lauren M.E. Goodlad write in their June 2025 Allegro essay, "Together we must define the magic and unite to ensure that those who may never have understood what music is for in the first place do not destroy the economic basis for our culture, the human artists who create it, and the public who need it. It is not too late."
In this fall 2024 study, Natalie Sammons probes generative AI grading tools: "It's a powerful narrative: an innovative new technology helps take a load off overworked teachers while also addressing the shortcomings of human grading such as bias and favoritism. If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is."
Image: Mediaeval Marionettes (illustration in a 12c. manuscript), from Helen Haiman Joseph’s A Book of Marionettes (1920)
THE HUMAN HANDS BEHIND AI
In this recorded honor's project presentation, Mehek Shah discusses the exploitation of data workers and underscores the need for regulation in the industry.
