AI platforms like ChatGPT, NotebookLM, and Gemini have taken over the digital world in some pretty wild ways. The benefits are hard to ignore—they can turn your class notes into podcasts or practice tests, clean up essays far beyond what autocorrect would ever catch, and even generate pictures or graphics on demand. They’re being used in fields like law and accounting to organize huge amounts of data, and some even create “gems” so the platform remembers your context for next time. Oh, and let’s not forget self-driving cars—that’s AI on the move, literally.
But of course, it’s not all perfect. Now we’ve got AI actors taking jobs from real people (just ask Tilly Norwood), AI art threatening creative majors like graphic design, and fake references popping up in academic papers. Writing often turns into a mess of “AI fluff,” and too many people use it as a substitute instead of a tool. On top of that, companies have to block AI from giving medical, financial, or legal advice, and it’s already replacing many entry-level positions that once helped people get their start.
As a Biology Major with a Minor in Public and Professional Writing, I see both sides clearly. In writing classes, AI is basically off-limits because clarity, creativity, and audience awareness are everything—and AI just doesn’t nail that yet. In Art of the Essay, we’re taught that our ideas should come from our own minds, and our creativity shows in how we express them, not just what we say or what published essay style we copy. My Biology professors aren’t big fans of AI either, though now that I’m pursuing my Biotech Master’s, it’s being discussed more as a helpful tool than a threat. Honestly, AI shines the most in my Computational Physics class—it’s great for coding and solving problems quickly, but it still needs human oversight to keep it on track.
AI has incredible potential, but it’s a double-edged sword. Used wisely, it can make learning, research, and creativity faster and more fun. Used carelessly, it can dull the very human creativity and skill that make our work worth doing. During its pre-digital experience, it was very time-consuming to sort through every book in the library, use analog computers, or use early search engines to find the information we needed. These new AI platforms have greatly helped with that, but need improvement.
OpenAI. (2025, November 12). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/