Where's your personal line for using AI in schoolwork or job applications

[Paul_26]

Everyone seems to have drawn their own private line for how much AI assistance feels acceptable versus feels like actual cheating, and those lines genuinely differ a lot from person to person, so I'm curious where people here have actually landed on this for both schoolwork and job applications specifically

For job applications my own line is that AI helping polish grammar and structure feels completely fine, but generating the actual substance of your experience or fabricating accomplishments you didn't have crosses into straightforward dishonesty regardless of how the tool gets used to produce it

Schoolwork feels like a harder case to draw a clean line around, using AI to explain a concept you're struggling with feels like legitimate tutoring, but having it write the actual essay you submit for a grade feels like a completely different category even if the underlying motivation, wanting to actually understand the material, might be identical in both cases

The part that actually worries me most is less about catching individual cheating and more about what happens to genuine skill development if an entire generation leans on AI heavily enough during the exact years they'd otherwise be building foundational writing and reasoning skills through repeated struggle and practice

Curious whether people draw a different line specifically based on stakes, a low stakes homework assignment feels different from a formal cover letter representing your actual professional judgment, or a college essay that's genuinely meant to reflect your own authentic voice and thinking