By Dylan Randolph – Contributor

As a student and employee, generative AI has been one of my biggest productivity boosters. It has allowed me to complete assignments better and faster, with an entire Encyclopedia’s worth of information on any given topic. Similarly, it has allowed me to do tasks at work in an hour that would take me ten manually. 

Really, the potential to utilize this technology from an academic or commercial standpoint is limitless. Now, I could stop my article here and you’d go along your merry way, using this revolutionary tech guilt-free – but this morning I woke up and chose violence. So, if you’re looking for ‘Five New ChatGPT Tips and Tricks That Are Guaranteed to Help You Ace Your Exams,’ I would put the paper down and go prompt it yourself. I believe that generative AI is a game-changer in productivity and innovation, but its implications for learning, employment, and society are far and beyond anything you could imagine.

So, you just finished the final paper for your business class. It was a case study on a failing company, where you were tasked with the consultant’s role of turning the business around. You know that if you really thought about the case, and all 11 pages of information that were provided to you, you could come up with a good recommendation, be proud of your work, and learn something along the way. However, you have 4 other final projects and only a few days to do all of them. So, you go onto Chat, ask it for ideas, which you use to form your recommendations. It gives you great ideas that you use – which is probably extracted from your class’s textbook – and you get a 90 per cent on the project. Wow, aren’t you just the sharpest tool in the shed! But did you really learn anything? Well, according to published research, you are 50 per cent more likely to retain concepts through active learning compared to passive learning, like being given the answers (Freeman et al., 2014). So, your answer is likely no, you learned little to nothing. If we’re all just cruising through school, relying on our personal assistants to do all the work for us, why are we even here? I rest my case.

Congrats! You’ve graduated from BU (finally), and with the help of ChatGPT writing your resume and helping you with interview questions, you manage to land your dream job at Meta as a Marketing Specialist. The job is great, and you could complete the same project in a day with AI that would have taken someone a month without it. One day though, you get a memo from Zuck. He writes, “Thanks to the significant progress we have made with AI, we are now able to accomplish much more with much less. This is why, effective immediately, we will be laying off 20% of our staff whose jobs can be done with AI. Cheers! -Zuck.” Do you think I’m crazy? Well, in early 2025, Wall Street execs projected “approximately 200,000 job cuts, attributing this reduction to the increasing adoption of AI technologies that automate tasks traditionally performed by humans” (Forbes, 2025). Oh, and don’t forget, AI as we know it has only been around for 10 years or so.

You might be thinking to yourself, “Dylan, you’ve beyond scared me straight, now where’s the silver lining?” Well, I’ll be the first to admit that my hot take isn’t exactly nuanced, and AI has and will have numerous merits in our world. For example, AI can help detect diseases early, accelerate drug research, and provide invaluable solutions for accessibility. The question isn’t whether we should use AI, but how we can use it wisely. To quote a great prophet of our generation, “AI is like a microwave: incredibly convenient, but if you try to cook everything in it, you’ll end up with a soggy mess. Use it wisely, and your life will be a lot tastier.” (ChatGPT 4o, 2025).