Raw LLM Responses

Lol I once said "I'll never touch AI! It needs to die! Worst creation since the Manhattan project!" but I've learned that's like a newspaper company saying the internet is terrible and all online newsapps need to be banned. It a) isn't true, and b) isn't going to happen, for better or worse. I've started using AI in my classes, not to write essays or do work problems, but to help me research and identify good resources, or to be a sounding board for ideas and approaches. It's often a long spinning drill-down process of "Let's focus on this aspect, can you find any good online articles talking about this? Give me at least 10 examples" followed by "How can I strengthen this sentiment in X part of my proposal/writeup?" sort of conversation. And honestly, I don't trust AI to not give me glamorous writing built on shaky, inaccurate data or single-sentence forum comments. It's very much like having an intern in that regard; I'm always double checking the sources. Is that considered cheating? Maybe. It feels more like doing a homework session with a buddy, like back in highschool, where you bounced ideas off each other and clarified certain concepts, but ultimately you wrote the damn paper yourself. I've found that it helps me be a better and more efficient student, on the contrary to some of my peers, as rather than encountering walls where I can't seem to find an answer and giving into to a subpar answer, I have a colleague now that can help me parse it out with a new perspective, and bring additional sources I might not have found on my own. So, while the day is young and I may very well be wrong, I view AI now as more of a fancier and fancier calculator; a tool to be leveraged to find the answer, not the answer itself.