An interesting question came up the other day in the WordPress suggested readings:

Do you use AI in your work? In what you’re doing?

The simple answer is: yes.

Why the answer is “yes”

I’m in that age category where I watched the personal computer take off like a rocket.

And I watched the internet evolve—going from random BBSs and text-based interfaces into the World Wide Web we know today: graphical information, powerful search engines, and what became one of the largest repositories of knowledge we’ve ever had access to.

Back then, the fears were familiar:

• theft of content
• theft of original thought
• theft of creative ideas
• inaccurate information

And honestly? Those concerns were valid.

We’ve had this debate before

A lot of schools and colleges were resistant to the idea of the World Wide Web being used for school work—especially at the public school and high school level. The “approved” method was still books and old-school research, which was long and arduous.

Eventually, that shifted. The web became accepted. It became normal. It became expected.

But the concern never disappeared—it just changed shape.

Accuracy and “the moving target” problem

There’s inaccurate information in books too. By the time a book is published—after editorial processes and time delays—some of what’s inside can already be out of date.

The web became a more organic record, which is both a strength and a weakness:

• Things update quickly.
• What’s accurate today may be outdated tomorrow.
• What you reference can disappear or get replaced.

That makes verifying and referencing harder, because the ground can shift under the source material.

AI isn’t that much different in that respect.

Speed changes everything (but it doesn’t remove responsibility)

The World Wide Web made research faster. AI makes it faster still.

AI can help you research in minutes what used to take hours or days. Before the web, doing a paper could take months—sometimes three months. With the web, you could maybe do it in three weeks.

Now? You can produce something in three hours that looks like it took six months to a year.

And that’s the point: it looks like it took that long because the polish is easier to achieve. But polish isn’t the same thing as truth.

A real example from college

Once, for a paper I did for one of my college courses, I used some AI—not to invent content, but to help with the mechanics of building the deliverable.

I used it for things like:

• formatting
• generating small visuals like Venn diagrams
• looking up materials
• turning the research I’d already done into a more coherent structure

Not because the information wasn’t there, but because it sped things up.

My professor admonished me for it—basically accused me of cheating, and came close to flunking me over it. It felt like it wasn’t just criticism of a method; it felt like a threat to my academic record.

Should colleges and universities ban AI?

I think banning it is a mistake.

Because AI still requires:

• fact-checking
• user input
• a prompt/request to produce anything

AI does not read your mind. AI does not read your thoughts. Nothing comes out of it unless something is asked of it.

It can make suggestions. It can format. It can help organize a set of ideas into a coherent pattern.

But it still requires your words, your judgment, and your responsibility for what gets submitted.

It’s a tool—like anything else.

So how do I frame it?

Yes, I use AI.

To me, it’s a tool—like books, like the World Wide Web, like search engines, like spellcheck.

It still requires:

• human input
• curiosity
• fact-checking
• judgment

It’s not what you use. It’s how you use it that counts.