Anthony shared his story as part of MECEP’s State of Working Maine 2026 report. Click here to read the full report.
Anthony is a computer science major in his final year at a Maine university. He also works for a Maine-based company building AI agents used to assist with workflow and productivity.
Generative AI was just starting to become a big thing when I was applying to college. My whole career plan was typing things out on a computer, and that’s what AI does — it types things out on a computer. I was pretty worried at the start.
It does replace some work. It can be used as a tool to speed up the process in some places. But overall, there’s a lot more to computer science. Just in terms of making decisions and figuring out how to put all these things together and where to apply them — there’s a human element.
I think my fears have died down a bit, but it’s still pretty scary how fast it’s growing. It’s kind of impossible to predict where it’s going to end up. But I have hopes that some safeguards will be put in place. They kind of have to be in order for it to turn out well.
I’m working on a project right now with AI chatbots that will be used to track and stay on top of schedules and assignments. If I am the teacher and AI is the student in this work, I’d say my student doesn’t really understand what it’s like to be human. It can mimic behavior, but it never really understands it. It’s my job to tell it exactly how to act, because it’s not going to know for sure unless I’m really specific.
I think as AI develops more, the role of computer scientists is going to shift to overseeing the AI as it works, and checking to make sure everything it’s doing is correct. It will be our role to put AI on the right path, and managing it as if you’re its boss. I don’t see my job going away. But it could shift a lot in terms of what I’m tasked with.
AI has so much potential, and it can do so much without you doing much input. It’s capable of doing so much good easily, but it’s also capable of doing a lot of bad easily if you have bad intentions.
There are aspects of AI chatbots where they will just keep trying to come up with an answer to whatever you’re asking it. What matters to the AI is that it gets an answer out. Usually it tries to be correct, but if it can’t be correct, it’s still going to get an answer out because it’s job is to get an answer out. If a human says something to a chatbot when they’re in a really bad headspace and the chatbot gives them an answer that makes the situation worse, that’s a real mental health issue. It’s important to have safeguards for that.
AI is not a therapist. It can’t handle that kind of thing. But it will try to be one unless we tell it that it can’t. There has to be a human aspect to some things, and that’s one of them.
Am I more excited or more concerned about AI? At the very beginning I was very excited. Then later, when we saw what it could do I became more fearful. And now I think I feel a bit of both. I feel pretty confident, career-wise, that I’ll have somewhere to be. But in terms of how it’s going to effect the general populace and politics and how it can generate things that affect what people believe — I think there are a lot of good reasons to be concerned about it.
I don’t think we should denounce AI usage altogether. Whether you like it or not, AI is here. You don’t have to use it, but you should know how to use it and how to take advantage of it.