Dear Reader,

My Honors English 10 class at Briar Woods High School viewed a series of material that questioned what it really meant to be human, and how certain people or things are judged because of their lack of certain stereotypical values. I decided to study this further, honing in on how humans specifically regard artificial intelligence, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri, and IBM’s Watson.

When my class analyzed Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, we brainstormed many ideas that could be explored further. What impact does society have? How does society treat people who differ in appearance? How far do we take revenge? How are we empowered? What are we entitled to? When do we as a society go too far? Is there a monster in everyone? What makes us human, and how do we judge people? What responsibilities do our parents have over us? What is the importance of a “good” name, and how can a bad name harm an individual? But most importantly, can we ever truly be happy?

As you can see by the medium that I presented this “Dear Reader” letter, and the entirety of my project, I am interested in the minutiae of contemporary technology (you can learn more about me at my personal website, riyaadazad.github.io).

Eventually, I realized that artificial intelligence can in fact be human, but most of today’s society is afraid to trust or accept that it is like that.

In order to reflect this ultimatum, I created four materials, each a different genre. To represent the fictional genre, I created a diary entry for Apple’s popular artificially-intelligent assistant Siri. For my non-fiction creation, I made an editorial on how Google Assistant helps society. For the multimedia aspect of my project, I created a video montage promoting the positive aspect of artificial intelligence. And finally, I made a visual advertisement based on IBM Watson.

The following blog posts are my creations, and I do hope that you’ll enjoy!