As with most things in our polarized society, much of what we read about AI tends to come from the extremes:
AI utopians heralding in a new era freed from drudgery where our robo-servants cater to our every whim
AI doom-and-gloomers predicting the end of most jobs and the rise of AI overlords who are sure to overthrow our entire civilization
But as with most things in our real world, the truth about AI likely resides somewhere in between.
So to become an AI realist, continue to keep using AI and you’ll start to notice some crystal-clear upsides and downsides
The Upsides
Once you’ve run those initial prompts on Perplexity above, most of the upsides should be readily apparent:
AI’s baseline is pretty good. Yes, the advice and cover letter were generic - but at least they were directionally correct. Which is probably more than you can say for the average student cover letter or the crazy hiring myths your students believe… 🙂
AI is available, fast, and free. While you could have probably found similar results on Google, imagine how long it would have taken you to read through a bunch of blogs and fluff to pull out the same insights and templates. And now realize that those 30 minutes of your life, which would have been lost forever, were replaced by approximately 30 seconds of “work.” Now you’re starting to get the power of AI!
AI can do the boring parts of your job. OK, now that we know what AI is actually good at, let’s put it in the context of career coaching and job-searching. Think about all the most boring parts of your job and the stuff that students have to slog through - resumes that don’t include keywords, atrocious cover letter grammar, writing the weekly student newsletter. AI can help with all of these tasks and more, freeing you up to focus on the much more important things - helping your students identify careers that fit their passions and gifts, coaching them through the adversity of the hiring process, and ultimately shepherding them to a career and life they love.
We’ll come back to that last point in a bit but for now, let’s also be really clear about the other side of the AI coin…
The Downsides
While these may not be as obvious as the upsides, the downsides are just as important to recognize. And to help you do, all you’ve got to remember are the ABCs of AI:
Accuracy
The biggest problem with today’s AI tools is that they hallucinate. A lot. And no, you didn’t read that wrong - “hallucinations” are the technical term for when AI presents fictional data as fact. For instance, if you were to ask Perplexity to “Create a career coaching resume,” it would happily do so. But you might disagree with its inclusion of “Pastoral care” under the skills! So it’s critical that we (and our students) get used to reviewing every single result with a fine-toothed comb:
Bias
Because most AI models were trained on society’s own data from 2021 and earlier (AKA the internet!), they’ve inherited two kinds of bias:
Temporal
While 2021 data might be fine for general career advice, it’s potentially devastating for anything that relies upon cutting-edge insights. Imagine you have a student who’s prepping for their Google interview tomorrow and so they ask Perplexity to “Generate a SWOT analysis for Google.” While this might look good on the screen, there’s a huge problem with what’s not on the screen - i.e., Google’s biggest threat today is clearly AI. That’s why the company announced its first Code Red in a decade right after ChatGPT came out. And yet, it wasn’t even a blip on Google’s radar in 2021 - i.e., the source of this data:
Societal
Perhaps you’ve heard this riddle before:
“A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies. The son is rushed to the ER. The attending surgeon looks at the boy and says, ‘I can't operate on this boy. He's my son!’ How can this be?”
While you may guess that the surgeon is the boy’s mother, 70% of surveyed respondents weren’t able to do so. Which speaks to the depth of bias that exists in our society, even as we build AI models at the cutting-edge of technology.
And so, because those models were trained on content created by humans, they’ve inherited our very human biases. Which means that if your students are trying out different career paths with prompts like “Tell me a story about a kindergarten teacher,” chances are they may not always see themselves represented in those career paths.
Confidentiality
As great as these free AI tools are, they do remind us of that famous Silicon Valley adage: “If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” For example, Google and Facebook users aren’t the true customers of those firms - instead, it’s their data and attention that is being sold to advertisers, the real buyers. And the same is very much true of any free AI tool - in exchange for tapping the (expensive) processing power of their AI models, your data and usage patterns are helping make the model more sophisticated. Which is something a Samsung employee recently learned the hard way after seeing their non-public data get incorporated into ChatGPT’s model.
And while most career questions may not feel highly sensitive, anytime a student uploads a resume into an AI (something we’ll discuss shortly), they should be aware that it could wind up part of the model’s data set. So to be safe, students should consider turning on their preferred platform’s incognito mode. Here’s how to do that for ChatGPT.
I know that’s a lot to keep in mind, so here’s a handy little guide for you:
