For Stu­dents: Learn­ing and Writ­ing
First, let's talk about the obvi­ous one: large lan­guage mod­els like Chat­G­PT or Claude. You prob­a­bly already use them. But most stu­dents use them in the wrong way. They ask it to "write an essay on the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion." This is a mis­take. It pro­duces a gener­ic, soul­less essay that your teacher will spot instant­ly. Even worse, you learn noth­ing.
The right way to use these tools is as a per­son­al tutor.
Let's say you're strug­gling with a con­cept in biol­o­gy, like the Krebs cycle. Read­ing the text­book is con­fus­ing. Watch­ing a video helps, but you still have ques­tions. Here’s a bet­ter approach:

Go to Chat­G­PT or Claude.
Type this prompt: "Explain the Krebs cycle to me. I'm a 16-year-old high school stu­dent. Use a sim­ple anal­o­gy, like a fac­to­ry, to explain each step. After you explain it, ask me three ques­tions to check if I under­stood."

This changes every­thing. Now, the AI is not doing the work for you. It's teach­ing you. You get a sim­pli­fied expla­na­tion tai­lored to your lev­el. The anal­o­gy makes it stick. And the ques­tions force you to engage your brain and con­firm you actu­al­ly learned some­thing. If you get a ques­tion wrong, you can ask the AI to explain that spe­cif­ic part again. It’s an inter­ac­tive learn­ing loop.
For research papers, skip the gener­ic chat­bots. Use Per­plex­i­ty AI instead. The rea­son is sim­ple: sources. When you ask Chat­G­PT a ques­tion, it gives you an answer, but you have no idea where it got that infor­ma­tion. It could be hal­lu­ci­nat­ing, which means it just made some­thing up. You can­not risk that in aca­d­e­m­ic work.
Per­plex­i­ty is dif­fer­ent. It's designed as a search engine. When you ask it a ques­tion, it scans the web and aca­d­e­m­ic papers. Then, it writes a sum­ma­ry answer. Cru­cial­ly, it includes num­bered cita­tions direct­ly in the text. You can click on each num­ber to see the exact source it used. This is incred­i­bly use­ful. You can ver­i­fy the infor­ma­tion and find high-qual­i­­ty sources for your bib­li­og­ra­phy.
Here’s how to use it for a research project:

Start with a broad ques­tion, like "What were the main eco­nom­ic effects of the Black Death in Europe?"
Per­plex­i­ty will give you a sum­ma­rized answer with sources. Look through those sources. They are your start­ing point.
Click the "Relat­ed" ques­tions fea­ture. This will sug­gest oth­er avenues of inquiry, like "How did the Black Death affect labor and wages?" This helps you nar­row your top­ic and build an out­line.

Final­ly, for writ­ing, you have tools like Gram­marly and Quill­Bot. Most peo­ple know Gram­marly. It checks your spelling and gram­mar. The pre­mi­um ver­sion also helps with clar­i­ty and tone, which is use­ful. It teach­es you to write bet­ter over time by explain­ing your mis­takes.
Quill­Bot is dif­fer­ent. It's a para­phras­ing tool. You paste in a sen­tence, and it gives you sev­er­al ways to rephrase it. This can be help­ful if you find your­self using the same sen­tence struc­ture over and over. But you must be care­ful. Using it to rewrite some­one else's work with­out prop­er cita­tion is pla­gia­rism. Sim­ple as that. Your professor’s pla­gia­rism check­er will catch it. The best use for Quill­Bot is to improve your own writ­ing, not to bor­row some­one else's. Use it on your own sen­tences to find more con­cise or aca­d­e­m­ic ways to express your ideas.
For Teach­ers: Plan­ning and Cre­at­ing Mate­ri­als
Teach­ers are over­loaded with admin­is­tra­tive work. AI can help claw back some of that time. For­get about using it to grade essays for now; the tech­nol­o­gy isn't good enough to han­dle nuance and cre­ativ­i­ty. Instead, focus on prepa­ra­tion and resource cre­ation.
Mag­ic­School AI and Curi­pod are two plat­forms built specif­i­cal­ly for teach­ers. They have pre-built tools for com­mon class­room tasks. You don’t need to be a prompt expert.
Let’s say you need a les­son plan.

Go to Mag­ic­School AI.
Select the "Les­son Plan Gen­er­a­tor."
Enter the top­ic: "Pho­to­syn­the­sis."
Spec­i­fy the grade lev­el: "9th Grade Biol­o­gy."
Add any spe­cif­ic objec­tives: "Stu­dents should be able to explain the roles of chloro­phyll, sun­light, water, and car­bon diox­ide."
The tool will gen­er­ate a full les­son plan, com­plete with learn­ing objec­tives, activ­i­ties, mate­ri­als need­ed, and assess­ment ques­tions.

It’s not per­fect. You will need to read it and adjust it to fit your stu­dents and your teach­ing style. But it saves you from start­ing with a blank page. It prob­a­bly takes a 60-minute task and turns it into a 15-minute one. You can also use these tools to gen­er­ate rubrics, cre­ate stu­­dent-friend­­ly expla­na­tions of com­plex top­ics, or even write emails to par­ents.
You can also use a gen­er­al tool like Claude for these tasks. Claude’s larg­er con­text win­dow is par­tic­u­lar­ly good for this. You can paste an entire chap­ter from a text­book or a long aca­d­e­m­ic arti­cle and ask it to do things. For exam­ple: "Here is an arti­cle about the Roman Empire. Please cre­ate a 10-ques­­tion mul­ti­­ple-choice quiz based on it. Also, gen­er­ate three open-end­ed dis­cus­sion ques­tions for a high school his­to­ry class." This is a fast way to cre­ate mate­ri­als that are direct­ly tied to your cur­ricu­lum.
Anoth­er great use is for dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. You have stu­dents with dif­fer­ent read­ing lev­els in the same class­room. It's hard to find mate­ri­als for every­one. With AI, you can take a sin­gle news arti­cle or text and adapt it.

Find a text you want all stu­dents to read.
Paste it into Claude or Chat­G­PT.
Use a prompt like: "Rewrite this text at a 5th-grade read­ing lev­el. Sim­pli­fy the vocab­u­lary and short­en the sen­tences, but keep the core infor­ma­tion."
Do it again for a dif­fer­ent read­ing lev­el if you need to.

Now you have three ver­sions of the same text. The whole class can dis­cuss the same top­ic, even if they read a ver­sion tai­lored to their needs.
For Researchers: Lit­er­a­ture Reviews and Data Analy­sis
For grad­u­ate stu­dents and aca­d­e­mics, the biggest time-sink is often the lit­er­a­ture review. You have to find, read, and syn­the­size hun­dreds of papers. This is where AI can make a huge dif­fer­ence.
Tools like Elic­it and ResearchRab­bit are designed for this. They help you map out the exist­ing research in a field.
Here's a com­mon work­flow with Elic­it:

You start with a research ques­tion, like "How does sleep depri­va­tion affect cog­ni­tive per­for­mance in adults?"
Elic­it will search a data­base of aca­d­e­m­ic papers (specif­i­cal­ly, the Seman­tic Schol­ar data­base) and return a list of the most rel­e­vant ones.
But it doesn't just give you a list of titles. It cre­ates a table. It pulls the key infor­ma­tion from each paper's abstract—like the study's pop­u­la­tion, inter­ven­tion, and main findings—and puts it into columns.

This lets you scan dozens of papers in min­utes. You can quick­ly see the con­sen­sus on a top­ic, iden­ti­fy gaps in the research, and find the most impor­tant papers you need to read in full.
Con­nect­ed Papers is anoth­er tool that works visu­al­ly. You input a sin­gle "seed paper" that is cen­tral to your research. It then gen­er­ates a graph show­ing you all the relat­ed papers. Papers that are fre­quent­ly cit­ed togeth­er are clus­tered close to each oth­er. This helps you under­stand the dif­fer­ent schools of thought in a field and dis­cov­er impor­tant authors you might have missed. It’s like a visu­al map of the aca­d­e­m­ic con­ver­sa­tion.
One final point: AI is a tool, not a brain. It makes mis­takes. It can be con­fi­dent­ly wrong. It has bias­es based on the data it was trained on. Nev­er trust its out­put with­out ver­i­fy­ing it your­self, espe­cial­ly for aca­d­e­m­ic or edu­ca­tion­al pur­pos­es. The AI doesn't "know" things. It pre­dicts the next most like­ly word in a sen­tence.
Think of it as an intern. It’s fast, can do a lot of the grunt work, and can give you a great first draft. But you are still the expert. You have to check its work, cor­rect its mis­takes, and pro­vide the crit­i­cal think­ing. The qual­i­ty of what you get out of it depends entire­ly on the qual­i­ty of the instruc­tions you give it. Be spe­cif­ic, give it con­text, and always, always review the results. The goal is not to let the AI think for you, but to use it to help you think bet­ter and faster.