When a friend told junior Mia Margulis that her chemistry teacher asked students to use generative artificial intelligence to figure out some questions on a worksheet, she was shocked.

“I remember being like, ‘If in the future all teachers do is ask us to use AI, how are we going to learn anything?'” said Margulis. “Because people now already use AI, and it’s already taking kind of a big impact on the quality of our work.”

According to Christopher Dees, chief information security officer at Onward Technologies Inc., generative AI is a term used to describe AI that can do more than just answer simple questions.

Some uses of generative AI include creating lines of code or being used in chatbots that communicate and provide assistance to customers on company websites.

“So this generative AI can carry a conversation with you … [it can] look up information, take pieces of the information that you’ve shared and use that to determine what you need and provide a result based on that,” Dees said.

Strategy consulting firm Tyton Partners conducted a fall 2023 survey on the amount of generative AI used nationally in higher education.

The survey reported that from March 2023 to September 2023, the use of generative AI rose dramatically, with 22 percent of faculty and 49 percent of students currently using it compared to 9 percent of faculty and 27 percent of students in the spring, said Kristen Fox, senior adviser at Tyton Partners.

“What we’re seeing is most students tell us, at least at the college level, that they’re using [AI] to better understand, to practice,” said Fox. “Not necessarily to shortcut or cheat.”

According to Margulis, she uses generative AI to summarize the plots of books she is reading to understand what happened in different scenes.

“Sometimes I ask it for what happened in a scene if the scene’s just making me a little bit stressed, and [to find] similar books or what people think of the books,” said Margulis. “And what platforms you can read [the books] on, because a lot of times I’m downloading e-books and they don’t have it in a lot of places, so [AI] knows all the places.”

According to Dees, many people fear AI is going to replace humans in the workforce, and while AI can be a beneficial supplement, he is not sure it is a beneficial solution across all enterprises or industries.

AI is sometimes programmed with biases. Biases outputted by AI include anything from recommending the products of one company over another or providing information that aligns with a certain ideology.

“Like you see with ChatGPT, these biases also fitler how and what the [AI communicates] with you and what they may or may not show you or present to you,” Dees said.

According to Margulis, she and her friend tried using ChatGPT to figure out how to find the solution to a math problem after they completed their tests.

“This was a math problem, but for some reason, all of the [AI’s] answers were all just code and totally unrelated to what we were doing,” said Margulis. “And it gave us a different answer every time so we could not be too sure on what the answer was supposed to be.”

According to Fox, AI literacy, which is the ability to use AI effectively, will become more important as students and teachers adjust to the use of AI in classrooms.

“One of the things that’s probably incumbent on our teachers and producers of some of these different tools is to make sure that you know how the tools work and how to be critical interpreters of their output and results,” Fox said.

It is not AI taking over jobs that people need to worry about, it is the people who use AI applications to be more competitive in the job market that people should be worried about, Fox said.

“How do you use this powerful tool to focus on skill areas that really do require human touch, human connection, human cognition and use AI, generative AI in particular, as a tool to write a first draft, get you unstuck, that type of thing and be more efficient?” Fox said.

According to Dees, AI could prevent crucial lessons from being learned through trial and error, which can result in people who are less strong in their areas of work.

“Understanding that problem-solving sequence is a very important skill that I think a lot of people are going to lose, or at least diminish, by relying on [AI] full-time to solve their problems,” Dees said.