The Student's Playbook for Thriving in the AI Era

As artificial intelligence reshapes our world, understanding its implications for education and career readiness has never been more crucial. This article explores how students can best harness AI, like ChatGPT, to navigate and thrive in this transformative era. When it was released in 2022, ChatGPT, OpenAI's Chatbot, took the world by storm. Naturally, the AI chatbot grew to 1 million users in just five days. According to SimilarWeb , last month alone, it exceeded 1.6 billion total views. Generative AI has marked a new era in the intersection of learning and technology. These advancements are not only changing many industries in the real world but are also impacting the way students will continue to learn and what students need to know going forward. As a student living in what feels like a pivotal society shift, I have begun a journey to soak up as much information about generative AI to help me understand the implications this AI boom will have on our education and our future careers. I utilize AI every day, and I believe it has made me about 5x more efficient than I used to be, giving me much more time to focus on things that matter more. My goal is to share the information I have learned about AI and how students can best utilize AI to optimize their working environment and keep themselves up to date with technology trends.

I've discovered that understanding AI's capabilities and limitations is crucial for students to leverage it in their academic and professional journey. I have put together some insights and strategies that will allow students to succeed in an AI-driven world.

1. Approach AI with enthusiasm, not with fear.

Approach AI with enthusiasm rather than apprehension. AI can be daunting, it feels extremely complicated, and it can sometimes lead us astray with wrong information. As a student, I have seen a tendency of fellow students or teachers to disregard this technology because of its complexity and perceived imperfections. Yet, waiting for AI to reach some version of perfection or dismissing it out of fear does a disservice. According to a 2023 survey by McKinsey & Company , "63 percent of senior executives say they have increased AI adoption in their companies over the past three years, and 74 percent expect AI to have a significant impact on their business activities in the next three to five years" (McKinsey & Company, 2023). The train has left the station; the technology is only continuing to get better. Those who are great at leveraging it are becoming sought-after by companies and are becoming more efficient.

Rather than viewing AI with skepticism, see it as a tool that can improve your performance. I'll share some practical use cases shortly, but I urge you to experiment with AI. Discover its use cases, navigate its quirks, and, most importantly, grow comfortable with its presence in our lives.

2. Talk to AI like a human.

When you brainstorm with a friend, it's an iterative process. You might throw out a suggestion, and your friend will respond to your suggestion or idea. It may not be what you are looking for, so you tweak your friend's suggestion and continue working on each other's ideas until you find what you want.

This example is exactly how you should interact with generative AI or any chatbot. If you ask one question and give it one prompt, you likely will not get the answer you are looking for. For example, say I ask it to help write me an email to a local business asking for them to come and speak to my club. The response may be extremely professional, it may be way too long, and it might be super vague. If that is the case, tell it what you want to change. Here's an example of where I interacted with ChatGPT and how that may look:

ChatGPT responds with an email template that is way too long and not very useful... Lets try asking it to shorten the email.

Perfect, the email is much more concise, now lets give the AI some context.

Now, this email is by no means perfect. But the goal is to show you that you need to keep adding on to your prompt until you get the results you are looking for. Once you are somewhat close, make sure to edit it yourself!

It takes time and practice to become good at prompting the AI. Sometimes it takes 5-10 prompts and iterations to get your desired outcome. Overtime it becomes easier to know how to strategically get the results you are looking for. Another tip to get better answers is to provide as much context as possible. Copy and paste as much information about the topic as possible, if its about yourself, tell it about yourself. The more context the AI is fed, the better outcomes it will have.

3. Utilize AI as a tool wherever you can

Every time I'm about to tackle a piece of work or an assignment, my first thought is always, "How can I use AI to do this faster or make my work better?" This does not mean using AI to cheat. The goal is not to ask it to write you an essay, and just use the essay. However, if you have an essay maybe you prompt the AI to give you an outline for the essay, or help you brainstorm ideas you can use in your essay. There are many more tools than just ChatGPT, and just a quick Google search will help you find a tool that can accomplish your goal. This has led me to find great ways to utilize AI. Here are a couple of use cases that students can start implementing.

1. Learning/Study Budy/Practice Tests: Say you're wondering about a complex topic within economics or about programming. Instead of spending plenty of time googling to understand it, you can dive deep into these subjects without feeling overwhelmed. You can ask AI to break down complex theories into bite-sized understandable pieces or ask the AI to explain it to you as if you were a 9th grader. Ask yourself how many times you have been studying a subject, and there's a piece of information you literally just cannot grasp. Utilizing AI has made it so easy to bypass this problem and learn complex subjects. If you are preparing for an exam, you can feed the AI information about the AI's topics and you can ask it to quiz you on those areas, adapt the difficulty based on your responses, or even explain the answers in different ways until the concept clicks for you. This isn't just about getting the right answers; it's about understanding the why and how, which is crucial for deep learning. For example, say you have a really complicated math or finance problem for an assignment. Instead of just using AI to solve the problem, use AI to explain the problem to you, or explain the parts you are confused by. For instance, maybe I am confused as to why I have to divide an interest rate by three or add one to a number. You can explicitly ask it to explain to you why you're supposed to do that, ask follow-up questions, and then have a much better idea of what is actually going on in the problem.Think of AI as a personalized 24/7 tutor. I encourage everyone to change their mindset about learning and utilize AI to help you create deeper understandings of the world around you.
2. Resume/Cover Letters/Emails: For students, we know how time-consuming yet important it is to have your resume and cover letter ready to go. You can upload your resume and ask AI to grade it. Ask it for suggestions, and then go in yourself and make changes. Creating cover letters has never been easier, as you can copy and paste information about a job, create your own template, and ask AI to help personalize each cover letter to each job. Ask the AI to check your grammar, or for some strong synonyms to make you sound more professional. There are so many possibilities.
3. Research Assistant: Some tools like Perplexity.AI or Copilot will give you sources along with AI-generated answers. This saves an extensive amount of time when searching for supporting research or data. It also allows you to double-check information and confirm that the AI is not hallucinating. I hosted a workshop on AI for about 15 other students. My favorite part of the workshop was when I demonstrated the perplexity tool. I asked the other students about a topic they are working on. One of the students explained that he was writing an essay on how habitat loss affects animals and species. I wrote that exact prompt into perplexity, and it instantly gave me a summarized answer with sources. He spent hours looking for good sources and quotes for this research paper but gasped when he realized I found the exact same sources and quotes he used in a matter of seconds. Just knowing how to utilize an AI tool like Perplexity allowed me to cut out hours of work yet achieve the same quality of work.
4. Creative Partner: Believe it or not, ChatGPT can be creative! Sort of... Remember its a tool you can use to help AMPLIFY your own creativity. I constantly use it as a brainstorming partner. For example, when creating this article, I asked, "Give me 10 ideas for a captivating title". It gave me 10 ideas. The idea I liked best was "A Student's Guide to Thriving in an Automated World," but it still was not what I was looking for, so I said, give me 10 ideas similar to this one. One of the options used the word "playbook," and another said "AI era." Although I did not specifically use a title generated by AI, I took the answers that I got from brainstorming with AI, put them together and found a title I liked for this article. I quickly got the idea of using the words "thriving, playbook, and AI Era," all by creatively brainstorming with the AI.
5. Get Creative with your uses: Take five minutes right now to consider how to better utilize AI in class or life. Here is just another creative example of how I am utilizing it in my sales class. We are doing sales roleplays where we roleplay as a seller, selling something to a buyer. To help me prepare for the roleplay, I copied and pasted all of the information on the case into the AI, asked it for takeaways, trends, things to focus on, etc... I then asked it to help me come up with insightful questions I can ask during the roleplay. Lastly, I told it to "act as the buyer and do the roleplay with me. Respond with follow-up questions and responses. Give me two objections and allow me to answer them for you". This helped me not only prepare for the roleplay but also allowed me to brainstorm with the AI to come up with out-of-the-box ideas to succeed in the sales environment. I have been trying to learn programming skills. Generative AI can generate code and explain code to you. I have been using it to write programs, and it has become an efficient process because whenever I am stuck, I have AI figure out the issues in my code. Try to think outside the box, get creative, and find new ways to use AI.
6. Multi-Model: These Generative AI models allow users to produce not just text but also images, videos, audio, and more. Try to find ways to utilize these tools. Canva now has a feature to remove the background from an image. In Photoshop, you can use the "generative fill" feature to extend a background or remove an object instantly. OpenAI's new 'Sora ' model looks to make amazing videos. Midjourney or Dall-e can create amazing images. There are tools like Insta Headshots that can instantly produce a professional headshot of you by training it on your own images. Scribe will allow you to create a tutorial in seconds. A quick Google search will show you many tools you can use to create mockups of products, instantly create a website, analyze spreadsheets, or input data for you. There is an endless amount of money being thrown into the AI space right now, and so many new tools are continuing to pop up.

4. Understand AI's Current Limitations & Ethical Implications

While AI is a powerful tool, it's crucial to understand its current limitations. AI lacks a true understanding of context, common-sense reasoning, and human-level creativity. It can sometimes produce biased or incorrect outputs. As a student, you should view AI as an amplification of your own skills and knowledge, not a replacement.

When using AI, always evaluate the outputs. Fact-check important information, use your own judgment and don't blindly accept everything AI generates as real. Combine AI's abilities with your own perspective and creativity. AI is best used to enhance and accelerate your work, not to do your thinking for you.

Although AI has many great benefits, it also has plenty of drawbacks and is creating new ethical issues. From an educational standpoint, many students are using it to cheat their way through work. Students should use AI to become more efficient and create deeper understandings, not to think for themselves. AI is leading to more misinformation and deep fakes, which is making it more difficult for people to trust what they see online.

AI technologies are still expanding and it is important to use good judgement for where and when AI should be used and how to effectively ensure it is being used in safe and harmless ways. Having a good understanding of how these technologies work can go a long way in helping identify misinformation that is spread using AI online.

5. Prepare for an AI-Driven Future

The most important part of this whole article is that AI is not perfect right now. You can still be successful right now without AI. However, what about 5 years from now? College students, or even high school students are in school at such a critical time of technological advancement. Teachers are trying their best to keep up to date with this technology, but there is no way for schools and universities to stay completely up to date.

As a student, I have had teachers who have not talked about AI, some who want nothing to do with AI and don't want students to use it, and on the other hand, I have had a couple of teachers who encourage students to use it as much as possible. This technology is rapidly approaching, and the education system has not caught up to prepare us for the AI boom to come, especially if you are graduating college in the next couple years. The job market is changing and AI will play a huge role in job's becoming obsolete, as well as new jobs requiring technical AI skills.

That means it is up to you to take the time to familiarize yourself with AI and stay as up-to-date as possible.

I stay current using LinkedIn, X(Twitter), and email newsletters. Find some people who are reporting on AI news or thought leaders who are publishing their ideas on AI and follow them. Take the time to take a Generative AI class or certification.

Conclusion

We are amidst one of the most important and impactful technological revolutions. While AI's rise creates challenges and uncertainties, it also opens up some amazing possibilities. As students, we have the power to get ahead of this technology, become experts, and harness this opportunity to amplify our potential and impact on the world. AI will not be replacing humans any time soon. I do strongly believe that many people will lose jobs, however, and that those who are proficient in AI will replace those who don't utilize it. Be the person who comes up with AI strategies for your company, not the person who refuses to learn and is at the will of this technology.

1. Try to become enthusiastic about AI and its outlook. It isn't going away!
2. Talk to AI like a human. Iterate your prompts, and try new things until you get the desired results.
3. Find creative ways to use AI. Start thinking, "Can I incorporate AI? If I can, will it make me more efficient, will I learn, or will it make my work higher quality?" Before you know it, you will become proficient.
4. Be cautious, leverage AI as much as possible, but make sure you are doing so safely.
5. Stay up to date by following AI companies; interesting AI thought leaders and AI news. Leverage your skills to become indispensable to companies.

If you can learn to use AI as your partner in tandem with your unique skills and perspective, you will be well-positioned to survive and thrive in this AI era. Embrace AI not as a distant future but as an opportunity in the now. By understanding and integrating AI tools into our learning and work, we prepare not just to meet the future but to shape it.