Leveraging Artificial Intelligence Without Losing Our Humanity

AI: The Catalyst Behind Gradly’s Rapid Progress

If not for artificial intelligence, you wouldn’t be reading this. That’s because, if not for artificial intelligence, Gradly wouldn’t exist. It is only because of AI that I was able to bring all of the wonderful ideas underpinning Gradly to bear in the amount of time I did, but we didn’t benefit only from the speed of development when creating this company. Gradly’s core value proposition relies on AI itself. Our software literally uses AI to enhance documents, fix resumes, and draft essays. Even beyond software engineering, though, AI has aided us in business development, marketing strategy, website design, and so much more.

But it’s not just us. The benefits of AI have reverberated throughout every nook and cranny of the global economy, allowing software engineers to ship code faster, lawyers to study precedent for their clients at incredible speeds, researchers to discover novel approaches for new pharmaceuticals, and millions more use cases. And we’re just getting started. Just as the economy of 2025 is practically unrecognizable to someone from 2020, the economy of 2030 will be practically unrecognizable to us now as AI permeates every facet of our lives from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we fall asleep at night.

All of this is to say that, as founders of an AI-company, we are enormously grateful that this technology exists. As a lean team, we have done the work of a team 4-5x our size with the help of tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity. AI has turned the Gradly team into superheroes, and–like many of you–we can only see our output getting faster and faster as time progresses. We will continue to adopt new and better models and prompting techniques for the benefits of our users, holding strong to our commitment to make AI accessible and useful to students trying to get into college or land their first job after graduation.

Human First

Think of all of the movies you have ever watched that depict some dystopian future wherein an AI is the threat. Terminator, iRobot, Battlestar Galactica, Westworld, the list goes on and on. Without fail, all of these depictions show the threat of AI being that it seeks to wipe out humanity for one reason or another. However, one outcome that I believe society/pop-culture has strongly underindexed ever since Alan Turing envisaged AI a hundred years ago was that the true risk of AI is that it will encourage us to stop thinking for ourselves. I’ve felt it, the other Gradly staff have all felt it. Sometimes it’s easier to simply let the neural network do the thinking for you. Why expend your mental energy on a difficult question if you can just dump the query into GPT and let it figure it out instead?

On the surface, this feels like it’s all upside. A free lunch. I will simply outsource all manner of critical thinking to my LLM so that I may focus on less brain-intensive tasks.

That’s a good thing, right?

Wrong.

Outsourcing critical thinking to an LLM has a hidden cost: atrophy of your mental acuity. Like almost everything in life, the less you practice something, the worse you’ll be at it. Whether it’s a foreign language, playing piano, swinging a golf club, public speaking, or even connecting a printer to a WiFi network, the more you do it, the better you get. The less you do it, the worse you’ll get. Thinking is no different. LLMs lull you into a habit of outsourcing critical thinking which without a doubt provides a short-term benefit, but comes at the expense of a long term cost of making you less able to navigate mentally-intensive tasks in the first place… ironically perpetuating and reinforcing the cycle. (Even now, as I write this, I feel tempted to fire up ChatGPT to ask how it can improve this paragraph!)

This is why we at Gradly believe so strongly that AI should augment but never replace your thoughts. If you use Gradly, you will notice that all of our tools rely on some amount of input from you, the user. Whether you’re working on an admissions essay for a college application, or a resume for a job, our systems ask you about your experience because we believe the final document should represent your voice, not ours. Our platform is designed to take your raw ideas, experiences, and goals and structure and polish them into a product that you would’ve likely never been able to generate on your own. This is what we believe is the sweet-spot of AI use: transforming you into someone with superhuman skills, but never losing sight of the real you along the way.

Embrace it or be Left in the Dust

Even now, three years after the release of ChatGPT, there are still an enormous number of people that do not use AI, or outright reject its utility. Let me put this as directly as I can: You must embrace AI or you will be left behind. Rejecting AI is self-defeating. What does a life without AI get you as a professional in the Western world? Slower research, weaker writing, countless missed professional opportunities, the inability to learn new skills on a whim, the list goes on and on. Imagine rejecting Microsoft Excel as a finance professional in the 90’s. Imagine rejecting the first operating systems with GUIs on home computers. Imagine rejecting spell-check when it came to word processors. Imagine rejecting Google Maps. Imagine rejecting mobile phones! I could go on, but you get the point, AI is already an invaluable tool to much of society and will become even more invaluable each and every day as intelligence itself is further commoditized.

We here at Gradly believe that we have an important role to play in teaching responsible AI use. We want our users to benefit overwhelmingly from our suite of really, really awesome AI tools, but we also strive to have our users employ these tools in a thoughtful manner. We want to preserve that mental acuity and not simply provide a shortcut for someone to click a button and instantly get accepted into college. I believe that we should aspire for a future wherein humans and AI can live in harmony with one another, where our lives are replete with examples of AI making things better, but this has to remain a two-way street lest we are doomed to live in a future more akin to the movie Idiocracy than Blade Runner.

So that’s our commitment to you. We will keep giving you awesome AI tools to help you land interviews, land jobs, and get those acceptance letters, but we ask that you always use Gradly responsibly. Deal?