Sherin Shirzadi (12) had just come home from a brutal AP Chem test on Oct. 29, but her spirits were immediately raised upon checking her email. In her inbox was exciting news: her research paper was going to be published in a medical journal. 

Over the summer, she attended the week-long Advanced Medical Neuroscience Internship at Georgetown University, where she listened to doctors’ lectures and participated in hands-on neuroscience simulations activities. In one such activity Shirzadi says they put electrodes on their hands in order to control arm contractions. In another activity they dissected a human brain. But most importantly, Shirzadi, in a team with other students, wrote a research paper. This was the main goal of the internship. Shirzadi said she and her teammates wanted to focus on something relevant to their generation, so they decided to research the effects that an  overreliance on AI can have on the cognition of children. 

“We had a lot of personal connections with h

ow people are switching to AI for their own personal problems,” Shirzadi said. “Not as something to make them improve their understanding, but they were emotionally relying on it to be like their own therapist.” 

Shirzadi said AI is having real effects on children today, harming both their school and social lives. 

“Kids are becoming emotionally attached to AI, like it’s a person,” she said. “Our proposal was to make a framework to send over to AI customers to show the different effects that the AI is having on these kids’ brains. It’s making them less social. It’s making them have less creativity, less attention span, and overall, they  are much behind the kids that didn

’t have access to AI.”

To mitigate these effects, Shirzadi and her teammates developed ideas for AI companies to implement.

“We developed a set of guidelines that AI companies should focus on, such as having parental consent to use the AI or having specific restrictions,” Shirzadi said. “Like, if you ask it like a personal question, the AI has to respond in a more general way, and be less supportive. For example, [if you say] ‘I’m not feeling good today, I’m depressed,’ instead of soothing you, it should refer you to a person or to a number to an actual person that responds to you, instead of what a generative AI is programmed to respond with.”

Shirzadi said she hopes this information will reach pare

nts to inform them on the impacts of AI as well as AI companies, so that they can create better protocols.

At the internship, Shirzadi and her teammates presented information to three Georgetown neuroscientists. Her research paper expands upon the topics she introduced in her presentation. Shirzadi says her paper was chosen for publication out of over 30 groups because of the pressing nature of the topic.

“The effects of AI on emotional cognition development are such a developing thing that’s going to be even more prominent in the future because of how much people are relying on it,” Shirzadi said. “So [the neuroscientists] really liked how we didn’t just focus on 

Chat GPT or something taking over the world. We actually focused on one specific part of kids’ lives. Since

 they’re our future, it’s a concerning issue.” 

Now that the neuroscientists have chosen their pape

r fo

r publication, Shirzadi and her teammates just have to make the necessary edits, and it will be published in a medical journal by the end of summer. Shirzadi said this opportunity really helped solidify her aspirations in conducting research in the medical field.

 “Writing a research paper isn’t something in the future; it’s something that I was capable of doing already, and I just didn’t know it until I was presented with this challenge and given a specific timeline, a week, to finish it,” Shirzadi said. “It o

pened my eyes to the fact that I’m capable of doing this, and I learned that I was truly interested in the medical field and being a part of contributing to improving the future generation.”