We are seeing it everywhere, integrated into everything. The Google “AI-generated summary” dominates the first page of Google search results. More and more people are replacing traditional search engines with AI chatbots like ChatGPT, the leading consumer AI model released in November 2022.
Maybe your first response to a tedious task, like completing an assignment, or even something like learning a skill or brainstorming ideas, something you could ultimately do yourself with time and the resources available to you, is to turn to Chat GPT. Why not?
On a superficial level, Generative AI can mirror nearly every human skill. I’m sure you’ve seen blatantly AI-generated “art” on signage out in the wild, or in advertisements.
Promotional works that would’ve traditionally required a company to hire a human designer with a budget, timeline, and other constraints are now being produced within seconds by computers, appropriating generations of human artworks and spat out as one lifeless amalgamation.
The goal of technological advancements throughout history was to make being human easier; to lighten the load of our laborious tasks and make our lives easier and energy better spent.
This is exemplified by revolutionary inventions such as the car, wheel, and telephone. This is also seen in past AI innovations, ranging from the 1960s with the birth of the earliest electronic computers used by companies like NASA, to the rise of the internet in the 1990s, and up to 2010 when voice assistants like “Siri” and “Alexa” normalized the casual usage of AI in our day-to-day life.
AI, in its current state (Generative AI, AGI), is obviously differentiated from its beginnings, which were limited by predefined systems. They often functioned as a tool to run in the background and accommodate human intellect.
Now, with capabilities for human-like intelligence and reasoning on its own, AGI can seemingly think for you, and its rapid popularization and growth are being named as the “4th Industrial Revolution”.
By the principles of Capitalism, however, less and less human work in an increasing number of fields is required. The true driving force of this “Revolution” is very well that companies simply want to spend less money on human employees.
On the consumer end, we’ve all been bombarded with AI programs. It seems like anything that a computer does is now being branded as AI.
It’s important to consider whether the rapid societal integration of AGI is poised to sincerely improve our lives, as did the car, telephone, or internet, or if it’s a product of the corrupt interests of large and wealthy corporations.
Nonetheless, the magnitude of impact by AGI has far exceeded what we’ve seen with any other previous innovation. What’s distinct is the speed at which our lives are being pervaded. It is undeniably “revolutionizing” nearly every industry, but also harming the integrity of the work comprising them.
We’ve been speculating about these effects ever since the birth of technology, but now the debate is an urgent reality for all parts of society that depend on the creative and intellectual contributions of people.
Pitfalls
Many argue that AGI falls short in many areas, and it does, for now. Recent studies have found that Chatbots are often “confidently wrong” more than 60% of the time; they were bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer correctly, and offered incorrect or speculative answers instead. They were also shown to fabricate links, cite syndicated or copied articles, and more. (Jaźwińska & Chandrasekar, 2025)
On another note, Gen Z and Millennials claim to be adept at determining whether images, videos, or writings are AI-generated or not by spotting telltale flaws like warped images, weird fingers, nonsensical letters, etcetera.
I’d also personally argue that ChatGPT’s writing can sound almost human, but it lacks the heartbeat of real voices. There’s a quiet precision to the way it writes — every sentence clean, every thought neatly wrapped — but it rarely captures the pulse of something real. It can imitate emotion, but it doesn’t feel it. Real stories have uneven edges, little stumbles, and moments that don’t fit perfectly into a formula — that’s what makes them human.
That paragraph was ChatGPT’d, and I’m betting you could tell. Those who have seen it enough say that they can recognize when something is written by AI.
Because the model works by probability and data, there are certain formulaic tendencies like the em dash (—) that indicate if something is AI-generated.
However, most who say that they can spot it by having been exposed to it constantly, go off intuition.
“It’s the vibe,” says one freshman at Roxbury High School. “It’s hard to say exactly what gives it away, but I can always tell when it’s ChatGPT because there’s just no soul in the writing.”
But it’s undeniably only getting better at everything. Given the growth we’ve seen in previous years, it’s safe to assume that most of AGI’s current flaws will be smoothed out in the next few.
It’s getting increasingly tricky for people to differentiate what’s the product of a human or a computer. You’ve probably played this game of spot-the-difference before, like with your mother on Facebook, who falls for AI-generated backyard camera footage of bunnies jumping on a trampoline.
There’s the notion that older generations are disproportionately fooled by AGI, or that such deception usually occurs in trivial contexts. But in reality, it affects every generation and demographic, and there are significant consequences to professional settings in particular.
Healthcare Industry
“We see AI in the healthcare industry as a benefit, but also in many ways a threat,” says Michael Drogan, a cybersecurity specialist at Atlantic Healthcare. “AI can appear to be someone from the industry, somebody trusted. We’ve seen attempts from cybercriminals to trick employees and executives into leaking information like bank accounts, social security numbers, and other sensitive information.”
Drogan explains that malicious emails called “phishing attacks” are personalized and specific requests, often posing as a manager or IT department, urging the recipient to disclose information or files that are then held as ransomware.
In the attacker’s hands, AGI is used to scour for details like employee names, departments, relationships, etcetera. This is done, very accurately, to send out messages at an alarming rate. It takes one leakage to seriously jeopardize not just company data, but by extension, the livelihood and safety of everyone involved.
“We do see the ability of the interaction that they’re able to have with those people,” says Drogan. “We are seeing many more threats than benefits, in that sense.”
When used in the hands of goodwill and with the sincere intent to improve lives, however, AGI in the healthcare industry can assist doctors to diagnose and treat disease, and most notably, perform surgery.
A recent study by surgeons at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington demonstrated successful surgery with an autonomous robot (Kim et al., 2025).
Although the soft-tissue surgery was performed on a pig, the robot was shown to apparently finish the job better than a human surgeon.
This suggests that robotically assisted surgery can help enhance the capacities of surgeons, potentially saving lives.
Education
AGI can also widely benefit Educational settings when it’s utilized in the correct context, with proper boundaries and ethics.
“For the things that I truly don’t deem as important as, for example, facing students, I have used AI,” explains Megan Santoro, English teacher at Roxbury High School.
She points out that AGI helps save teachers’ time on tasks like grading or creating lesson plans, which allows them to better prioritize their attention.
Moreover, for students with disabilities or multilingual learners, tools like speech recognition and captioning are now improved and better personalized with AGI, supporting equity in education. (US Department of Education, 2023)
“As we progress as a society, we have to find ways as teachers to help students use it to their benefit, and not replace their skills, which is a fine line. I hope it doesn’t replace my job!”
Teachers are trying to set clear expectations for AGI usage that foster a collaborative culture. But its integration into education is a very slippery slope. Determining what inevitable use of this “tool” is intellectually and morally acceptable is very difficult.
The risks of AGI usage in the fields of Cybersecurity and Education are a dramatic comparison. If a student uses ChatGPT to write their essay, the immediate impact won’t be nearly as shocking as would a widespread data breach, but over time could raise a generation of incapable people.
“There are tons of potential drawbacks,” she says, “most of them are students using it in place of thinking; critical thinking skills, analysis. It can write your whole assignment for you.”
AGI reduces the opportunity and need for recall and problem-solving. This over-reliance on external aids is referred to as cognitive offloading, which affects students’ memory retention, problem-solving, creativity, work ethic, and general need to think. (Chen et al., 2025)
“The fear that I have is that students are going to use AI to take the place of the skills that are necessary to develop and grow in school; use it to cheat rather than a tool that can help enhance your work,” says Santoro.
In other words, schoolwork is meant to present challenges to be overcome by trial and error. Every time you struggle, you expand on that skill.
But at a certain point, if the ‘tool’ is just doing everything for you, it defeats much of the intellectual and integrous purpose of schoolwork.
Systematic Challenges
But this isn’t to add to the stigmatic undercurrent of laziness and incompetence in using AI like that. Many people are, in retaliation to the detriment of AGI, shaming people rather than analyzing the systematic and structural reasons why people may be so inclined to use it to do basic tasks for them.
The emphasis on optimization and the end product profoundly influences how we view education, but more broadly, productivity. Productivity has gone up, the cost of living has gone up, but wages have not. Employers are starting to demand more & more from workers for the same salary.
AGI is the fastest, most efficient “tool” available to meet those demands, but ironically, it contributes to worsening that uneven playing field. It creates more problems for the working class than it solves.
This goes back to the “greedy company end” and job displacement. From a flat, economic standpoint, the starving artist simply cannot compete with the efficiency and profit of AI-generated imagery.
By this same logic, we have taught students to optimize learning- if the ultimate goal is getting the grade or degree, then why not use the fastest tool available?
When used like this, Generative AI is also only about the end product. It doesn’t teach you anything about the process it would take to get there, which saves time (“time is money”) but takes the value, identity, and joy out of hard work.
“I feel like what’s rewarding about making stuff is figuring it out on your own or with a group of people,” says one junior at RHS. “Turning the thing you struggled with into something you’re proud of is the fun part.”
AGI will never possess human qualities like compassion, wisdom, and moral discernment. This fact is made clear across interviews.
In each case, it was only truly beneficial when used as a tool in applications like medicine and education to facilitate manual labor. In that sense, there are plenty of great uses for AGI.
Conclusion
There’s no easy answer to the recurring question: “Why not?” and the ethical issues and nuance it poses. For your personal usage, as the consumer, the boundaries you set with AGI are crucial, though ultimately subjective to what you deem meaningful and often overshadowed by the need to keep up with the demands of life.
While that 11:59 assignment may not be particularly meaningful to your creative expression, allowing ChatGPT to do it for you arguably still robs you of that opportunity to think and build on that ability by simply struggling with it.
The majority of people want a nice life, to live more than they work, and to spend the time that they have doing what’s meaningful to them. When technology offers a shortcut to impersonal, tedious tasks, it can feel like a no-brainer.
But the line distinguishing empowerment by a modern appliance from giving your ability and willingness for human creation to a program owned by the largest corporations in the world is easy to blur by systematic design.
To AGI, there is the good, the bad, and the evil. That evil does not come from the consumers, but from the tech billionaires who want to profit off the pressures and needs of the working class, while simultaneously diminishing the value of human labor.
It’s arguably easier to draw parallels to those dramatic Sci-Fi movies about robots taking over the world than to past inventions, which is probably why it’s hard to gauge where we’re headed without alarm and dread.
But the most powerful thing we can do right now is set those boundaries; safeguard the parts of your humanity that AGI can only superficially replicate with probabilities and stolen data: your creativity, improvisation, free thought, and intricacies as a human being.
