Author: Nita Farahany Source: https://nitafarahany.substack.com/p/from-how-ai-works-to-what-ai-does Published: January 19, 2026
An essay by Nita Farahany, published January 19, 2026, documenting the opening class of her Spring 2026 Advanced Topics in AI Law and Policy course. The class pivots from the Fall introductory course's question of how AI works to the Advanced Topics question of what AI does to its users, and it sets out cognitive liberty as the course's organizing concept and a three-pillar curriculum for the semester.
Summary of the argument
Where the Fall intro course examined how AI works (training data, compute, alignment, manipulation), the Advanced Topics course pivots to what AI does to its users: the cognitive, behavioral, and constitutional consequences of digital systems shaping human attention, autonomy, decision-making, and self-knowledge.
Farahany's organizing thesis is that the legal status of human cognition under conditions of pervasive algorithmic influence is the central unsolved problem of digital-age law. She frames cognitive liberty as the umbrella under which attention rights, mental privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination converge. The course is positioned downstream of recent neurotechnology developments, including the Meta EMG band, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), and emotion-recognition systems; its premise is that the line between mind and device is collapsing and that the law has not kept up.
Three-pillar curriculum
The semester is organized into three pillars:
- Architecture of attention (Weeks 2–4): how digital environments capture and direct attention, and the law's response to dark patterns, addictive design, and platform engagement architecture.
- Architecture of cognition (Weeks 5–7): AI companions, personality assessment, and persuasion, and how systems substitute for, augment, or manipulate human reasoning.
- Architecture of self-knowledge and judgment (Weeks 8–11): consent, child safety, the Fifth Amendment and cognitive evidence, and the First Amendment and algorithmic speech.
Relationships
- part-of: Nita Farahany Advanced Topics course series (Class 1 of ~30)
- introduces: Cognitive Liberty
- next: Inside My Advanced Topics Class 1.2: What AI Does To Your Thinking (Farahany, January 2026)