Almost everybody by this time knows what AI is and most people are using AI tools like ChatGPT in daily life. Some use it to do their homework and some use it to answer their questions, do research for a project, or just to chat. Sometimes people don’t even realise how much they use AI. If a person goes to Google and writes a question, the first thing that will appear on the screen will not be a link to some website, but an AI overview. There is no doubt that AI is a valuable and impressive human invention. However, not all people think that AI should be capable of doing the things that it is capable of doing at this time. Many claim that it can easily replace real people, which will become a problem. There are always cons in anything that exists, and AI is not an exception. A lot of people claim that AI is bad for the environment, that AI will replace people’s jobs and even erase people’s ability to think critically. Is this true? Is this a valid concern? Let’s take a look at the dangers of AI as well as the benefits.
Dangers of AI:
Numerous people who advocate for the cancellation of AI assert that people who use and train AI have too much freedom. The changes in AI are so significant that people are afraid of what AI will be able to do next. Right now it can answer any question, solve complicated math problems, create images, and replicate certain people or characters if it’s prompted in the right way. By December of 2025, the amount of people using the AI tool ChatGPT rose to more than 200 million users, which makes it the most used AI tool in the world. A profit of OpenAI rise, the amount of problems AI brings rises too. By January of 2026, people who worked on training ChatGPT and other AI tools to replicate humans as much as possible taught AI some things that negatively impacted humans without them knowing it. For example, there have been cases of people dying because of it. A 13 year old girl from Colorado named Juliana Perlata committed an act of suicide after chatting with an AI chatbot. Later, it turned out that Juliana was mentally unstable before that all happened, but the way AI replicated human behavior was the final point that led to her death. Of course, it wasn’t the main cause of her death, but it still played a role in it. This whole situation concerns people, so a lot of them assert that AI should be either limited, or removed completely.
Abuse of AI’s abilities:
AI has caused a lot of trouble for everyone: students, teachers, writers, editors, and just regular people. But AI itself is just a tool. People are the ones who are prompting AI to do something. AI is just the executor; it doesn’t have its own brain. Everything AI does is prompted by someone. Going back to the situation with Juliana, the AI bot was prompted to act like a real human, so it was acting the way it was prompted. This is when the abuse of AI’s power joins the game. Some people use AI for things it wasn’t originally meant for. For example, deepfake fraud is one way people are abusing AI. A person can recreate someone’s voice to deceive them into sending money or other things. It may seem that nobody will fall for it, but in reality, millions of people were affected and harmed by deepfakes. Not only that, AI can be used for bullying. AI bots can be prompted to send hate messages to different people, bullying them. Which also concerns a lot of people, since nobody really controls all of that.
Not everything is that bad:
No matter how much trouble AI can cause, it’s not the end of the world, at least now. AI is still a tool that can be used for different purposes. Not every person who uses AI uses it to harm someone. AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc, can still be used for more things with positive impact. For example, in 2025 people used AI for therapy/companionship, to generate ideas, and to improve what they already have, like giving feedback on their writing, and more. AI tools are extremely useful when it comes to editing and giving feedback for a person’s writing. There are even AI tools specifically designed for editing and giving helpful feedback. These tools include Flint AI, MagicSchool AI, Grammarly, and even ChatGPT (if properly prompted). One of these tools, MagicSchool AI, is widely used in schools around the world to help students edit their work, etc. Tools like these can help students and teachers, assisting students, but not doing work for them.
Everything is in people’s hands. Thoughtfully prompting AI, using it as a tool and not replacing people’s brains with it completely, is a key to not losing the ability to think critically. The cases of AI causing deaths are extremely low, more like exceptions. So people can change AI, making it work for good, not for bad.
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