Artificial intelligence has the potential to disrupt careers, even as it continues to grow in influence and promise.
That’s the message from JetZero CEO Tom O’Leary, who recently warned Elon University students about the consequences of relying too much on potentially inaccurate AI.
““People can get really stupid really quickly, and some of us do,” O’Leary told 175 students at Elon’s Martha & Spencer Love. business school. “There’s no question about that. That’s what’s difficult about life.”
To explain his sobering feelings, O’Leary recalled an exchange he had with another Elon, Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk, nearly 20 years ago. Prior to the launch of Tesla’s first electric car, O’Leary worked as the automaker’s director of sales and marketing.
Musk entered O’Leary’s office and pulled the door behind him. “He’s pulling his hair out,” O’Leary said of the pending divorce. He broke up with Justin Wilson Musk in 2008.
“I wanted to be there for him, but I’m not a kisser,” O’Leary recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, it must be really hard to be you in terms of how do you know who’s telling you the truth and who’s just telling you what they think you want to hear, right?’
O’Leary said Musk left without responding. What he told Musk stuck with him, and today he describes two aspects of AI.
“It’s how much depends on it. And at what point do you know if you’re being told the truth?” he said. “I don’t know.”
O’Leary, a student at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, conducted his research using a technology known as microfiche. He described the eye-straining task of reading newspaper articles printed in miniature on film, which is almost inconceivably tedious when compared to AI. To read the text, the film must be placed in the tray below the illuminated magnifying viewer.
“I slid the tray around like a Ouija board until I found the article,” O’Leary said. “Then I take notes. I literally have to write down the quote I was looking for.”
In contrast, the CEO told the students, “All you have to do is reach for your phone,” and instructed an AI language model like Claude to “tell me the answer to this question, quote it, and actually write an eight-page paper on this topic.”
O’Leary cited research showing that exposure to “heavy amounts of screen time” before the age of 10 can destroy the brain’s gray matter and stunt brain growth.
“They literally have less brain power. And that’s probably some of you in this room. But there’s going to be another population in this room, and hopefully that’s the majority in this room, who are going to be smarter than us because they have access to all the information in the world. And it’s going to be about what you trust.”
