If I could sit down with ChatGPT’s CEO, I would tell them to change its programming to not create full essays and stories. Today, many college students care solely about completion of assignments. College students are very sensitive with their time. If a student can take any shortcuts to complete an assignment, they will. With ChatGPT being able to complete assignments and essays, this does nothing but hinder college student learning and skills in the grand scheme of things. With this, and some reasoning, one could argue that ChatGPT hinders college students’ ability to be productive in their careers and their ability to perform well on tasks in the real world. This is also concerning because college students rely far too much on ChatGPT. With ChatGPT hallucinating information at times, this could also hinder college students by being misinformed by ChatGPT. While Chat can be helpful in a lot of ways, the harm that it can potentially do to college students is immense, and I feel that students should be more aware of these risks before using ChatGPT to assist them.

Topic: “How do you plan to integrate AI in your life going forward – whether personally or professionally? Do you feel you have a choice here, for example is deciding not to use AI an option?”

As AI is becoming a huge head-turner in modern technology, I stop and wonder how this could affect me as a human being in relation personally and professionally. If I were to be honest, on a personal level, I do find AI kinda useful for my needs and interests. Such as brainstorming what to do on a day, what to learn something new based on facts and instructions, and what to follow if you have a simple health concern, like stress.

On a professional note, I still find AI useful for my cognitive disability needs, such as simplifying instructions and creating a simple task checklist to get things done, however, AI is still pretty questionable when it relates to academics because anything can go wrong and you do your best to figure out how to use AI effectively in your academics without becoming too dependent on it as a “Solution to everything”. It’s like the internet for example, it may seem like it has answers to everything but there are misinformation and fraud on the internet that we sometimes have no knowledge or evidence that is true.

As a human being, I still have a choice. There’s nothing stopping me from making a decision that could affect me in the future. As long as I pause and think carefully about how I use certain things, like AI, the result of my choice will only say.

I plan to use AI both personally and professionally going forward. At this point, not using it is not an option for me. After having taken this class and learning about its downsides such as the environmental costs, limited policy guidance, and potential impacts on skills like critical thinking and summarizing, I will be more careful about how, when, and for what I use it. This is all because I want to stay mindful of environmental responsibility, continue thinking independently, and remain aware of risks like data misuse. As I learn more about how AI systems work and their broader effects on society and on me, I’m beginning to clarify my own stance and set boundaries for responsible use. Ultimately, AI is a powerful and convenient tool that isn’t going away and I think learning to use it thoughtfully is an important skill to have going forward.

Everything that we have covered in this class has been under the assumption that the integration of AI into daily tasks is inevitable. I wish that I did not agree with this fact, but I do. I spend many hours of my life on Adobe platforms, and I have for many years. One thing that I have noticed the most is that with every update of Adobe comes another AI tool that is shoved into your workspace. It has gotten to the point that after working in Photoshop for too long, my computer will start to crash.

While this is extremely frustrating, I have also found that many of these AI tools do help me to complete simple tasks faster. Just as we have discussed in this class, AI is never perfect and even when I am using it on a platform that is suggesting its use, I often have to go back through and fine tune the changes that AI made to any given project. This use of AI tools is not going to go away in the content creation realm any time soon. At first, it seemed like the AI tools were something fun to just play around with, but now it seems as though I cannot complete a project without using them at least once.

From this class, I have gained the knowledge to ethically pick and choose my moment of using AI. LLMs are never going to replace human creativity, but they have made it easier to navigate creative outlets that have often been too complicated for an untrained eye. In the future, I hope to continue to use LLMs and their tools to further my work and polish designs. But I never want an LLM to determine what my pieces convey or change my style.

People have raised concerns that AI will steal your job or write your homework for you. One concern that I don’t see enough people talking about is that we are outsourcing our thinking to LLMs. This has wide-ranging impacts on lots of things. You might be thinking, “Why should I be thinking about how to specifically phrase an email when Claude can hit all the key points you want to in seconds?” Some people have even started using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google, which I think shows a lack of understanding of how LLMs work. For many people, the problem-solving skills that forced our brains to figure things out are being smoothed away by AI.

This matters because human relationships all run on the ability to reason independently and to change your mind based on your own thinking. LLMs don’t even have the capacity to “think” for themselves. The moments when we don’t understand aren’t meant to be optimized by LLMs. If everyone delegated their capacity to think based on models trained on yesterday’s consensus, we wouldn’t form the unique opinions that make humans special. So, I say, write that boring email, and do it in your own voice.

Topic: How do you plan to integrate Al in your life going forward – whether personally
or professionally? Do you feel you have a choice here, for example is deciding not to
use Al an option?

Al will be a big part of my day-to-day life from here on out. On a personal level I do not enjoy
interacting with Al. especially emotionally; I also do not agree with the ecological costs of building
massive and powerful Als. However as a chemistry major going into industry, there is not a piece
of data I will ever collect that I won’t be putting into Al. My field requires me to know how to use Al
and its really become a non-negotiable so regardless of any concerns I have, I would not have a
choice in my Al use.”

This topic is important because research and development is an extremely important step in the development of new technologies. In chemistry research there are so many necessary steps and checks that AI would not be able to pass.

https://www.cas.org/resources/cas-insights/ai-models-for-chemistry-charting-the-landscape-in-materials-and-life-sciences