I suspect the most valuable use of AI will be as an intermediate tool rather than to produce final output. Examples of how I've productively used AI:

• Literature review. Picks out the most famous/important papers on any given topic for you. Works good as a starting point for further digging.
• Tool to assist my students with writing. I use the AI to give them automated feedback on their grammar, structure, and flow so that by the time the essay gets to me, it's more readable and I can grade for content.
• Sorting/searching items by relevance. Not really generative AI, but uses the same underlying technology of semantic embeddings. Better AI models = better embeddings, so I consider it in the same category.
  • What's cool about modern accessibility of embeddings is that you can easily spin up your own system so search through your own collection of documents for whatever you need.