Building Ethics Lab

This is Substack post number one, and it’s about building Ethics Lab.

Ethics Lab started as a mission between my co-founder, Michael, and me. I was the AI guy. He was an aspiring lawyer. We’d known each other since middle school through debate, spending weekends traveling across the country to tournaments, arguing everything from phone voting to aid in Haiti.

When we got to FAU, we’d reserve study rooms to prepare for debate rounds.

Instead, we’d spend hours talking about AI.

Whether AI was conscious. Whether it wasn’t. Whether intelligence requires experience. Whether machines could ever be creative. Whether any of this was going to fundamentally change society.

Hours and hours disappeared in those study rooms.

Originally, we thought we’d start a podcast.

But then Michael had the idea to move our conversations to the fifth floor, where everyone hangs out between classes. And people started joining in.

Someone would overhear us and sit down.

Then another person.

Then another.

Suddenly, there would be four or five students sitting in on a conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with them, asking questions and sharing opinions and trying to understand this thing that seemed to be changing the world overnight.

A lot of them weren’t trying to argue.

They just wanted to learn.

That was probably the moment Ethics Lab was actually born.

Michael and I looked at each other and thought:

What if we just built a way to teach people about AI?

For context, Michael’s mom is a teacher, so education was already something close to home for him. We started talking to teachers ourselves, including our debate teacher, Ms. Potter, along with members of the A.D. Henderson staff.

Michael had been there since elementary school.

I’d been there since pre-K.

Every single one of them told us the same thing:

This is a problem.

Students are using AI.

Teachers don’t understand AI.

Schools don’t know what to do about AI.

And nobody seemed to have a good answer.

So we decided we’d try to build one.

Building It

One of the benefits of being on a college campus as high schoolers is that we have access to university-level opportunities. One day, we got an Email about A GoDaddy Entrepreneurship bootcamp.

We attended the GoDaddy Entrepreneurship Bootcamp and somehow ended up winning one of the prizes.

They gave us a domain name.

And from there, I started building.

I spent days, then weeks, then months building our learning platform.

Then Michael had what was probably one of the smartest ideas in the entire project:

Instead of expecting teachers to teach AI themselves, which is incredibly difficult if your expertise isn’t in AI, why don’t we just film the lessons ourselves?

Great idea.

Also, an unbelievable number of logistical problems.

So naturally, we procrastinated on it.

I kept building the platform.

Then I met someone named Vito Borio.

Vito was a master’s student who needed help building a website for a study he was running. We happened to meet at exactly the right time, and I ended up helping him with it.

As it turns out, he had connections in FAU’s School of Media.

A few conversations later, a few strings got pulled, and suddenly, Michael and I were spending our summer filming inside a professional studio.

Once we had the studio, everything became real.

We recruit a team that we’d meet once a week, sometimes once every two weeks, and film four or five lessons at a time.

There are only ten lessons in the curriculum now.

The first batch got scrapped completely.

One of the best learning experiences was trying to coordinate episodes and filming, I mean, you really don’t appreciate the complexity of it all until you are trying to film something of your own.

Eventually, we found our footing.

And if Vito somehow ends up reading this:

Thank you.

Seriously.

He volunteered countless hours of his summer helping us film and build something he believed in.

He’s moving to Italy now, and I can’t wait to visit him someday.

We’re also going to be publishing a research paper together based on the study I helped him build, which is incredibly exciting.

I even got to watch his master’s thesis defense.

The People

More than anything else, Ethics Lab has given me friendships I probably wouldn’t have made otherwise.

I reconnected with people I’ve known since I was four years old.

I met people like Vito who volunteered entire days of their summer because they believed in the mission.

We had some people like Mia who drove hours to Boca Raton just to film with us.

She paid for her own gas.

People came in on weekends.

People gave up time they could have spent literally anywhere else.

Nobody was doing this for money.

Nobody was doing this because they had to.

They did it because they believed AI education mattered.

The dedication of this team has honestly been incredible to watch.

Where We Are Now

The videos are done.

Now we’re trying to find editors, which has been significantly less fun than filming them.

A while back, we won a few hundred dollars at a hackathon, and a few of the people from that event ended up joining Ethics Lab and even pledged some of that money toward helping us finish the project.

That might let us bring on a VA to help with editing.

At the same time, I’m putting the finishing touches on the platform itself.

Today, we announced something I’m especially excited about: an ethical AI learning companion built directly into the platform.

Because schools shouldn’t have to choose between banning AI and handing students a cheating machine.

There should be a third option.

AI that helps students think.

AI that teachers can monitor.

AI that teaches concepts instead of replacing learning.

Beyond that, we’re building assignments, live sessions, classroom discussions, activities, and tools that let teachers actually work alongside students instead of competing with the technology they’re already using.

We’ve poured an absurd amount of time into this.

All for one goal:

Teaching students how to understand AI before AI reshapes everything around them.

Why Any Of This Matters

Because AI is going to change the world.

Honestly, it already is.

The strange thing is that many of the decisions being made about AI are being made by generations that won’t live with the consequences for very long.

Gen Z doesn’t get much of a say.

And yet we’re the generation that’s going to inherit whatever gets built.

One of the biggest fears among people my age is unemployment because of AI.

Most people are learning about the technology through headlines, TikToks, and science fiction.

We wanted to create something better than that.

Something that explains what AI actually is.

What it can do.

What it can’t do.

What risks are real?

What fears aren’t?

And how to navigate a future where these systems become part of almost everything we do.

We’re currently working to get the curriculum endorsed by researchers, educators, and leaders in the field.

The goal is simple:

Help schools teach AI well.

If You Made It This Far

First of all, thank you.

This is my first Substack post, so hopefully it wasn’t terrible.

If you’re an educator, know an educator, or just want to learn more about what we’re building, please reach out.

I’m a student founder.

I love building things.

More importantly, I love building things that help people.

And I genuinely believe AI literacy is going to become as important as computer literacy or internet literacy.

The students growing up today deserve to understand the technology that will shape the rest of their lives.

We’re trying to help make that happen.

Thanks for reading.