BEYOND PRODUCTIVITY:

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping how people complete professional, creative, and language-mediated work. While AI is often celebrated for productivity, less is known about how users maintain human judgment, originality, quality, and ethical responsibility when AI becomes part of everyday practice. The purpose of this study was to investigate the ways in which AI is used in different fields, how users manage the use of AI technology in their creativity and ethics, and what implications of such experience can be drawn for education, including language education. The qualitative multiple-case narrative inquiry method was used, involving five participants working in the field of academic activity, entrepreneurship, creation of an e-book, professional translation, social media content production, and book writing for educational purposes. The data were collected via semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic narrative analysis. The results reveal that AI served as a partner in productivity, a producer of the first drafts, a partner in thinking, a language improver, and as a facilitator of the workflow. However, AI output was not accepted by participants without any criticism. Users revised, checked, contextualized, and humanized the output of AI in order to retain originality, precision, professionalism, and ethical responsibility. The conclusion of the study is that the use of AI technology is connected with competences, as well as linguistic, critical, creative, and ethical judgment. It implies that education should prepare learners with AI literacy, prompt literacy, critical reading, editing, fact-checking, translation awareness, digital communication, multimodal content creation, and ethical authorship so future generations can use AI responsibly in academic, professional, and creative contexts.