AI’s Disruptive Effects on Education
The real threat AI poses to education isn’t that it encourages cheating. It’s that it discourages learning.
We know that one of three things happens when people use a machine to automate a task they would otherwise have done themselves:
Their skill in the activity grows.
Their skill in the activity atrophies.
Their skill in the activity never develops.
AI’s use by high-school and college students to complete written assignments, to ease or avoid the work of reading and writing, is a special case. It puts the process of deskilling at education’s core. To automate learning is to subvert learning.
The pedagogical value of a writing assignment doesn’t lie in the tangible product of the work — the paper that gets handed in at the assignment’s end. It lies in the work itself: the critical reading of source materials, the synthesis of evidence and ideas, the formulation of a thesis and an argument, and the expression of thought in a coherent piece of writing.
An ironic consequence of the loss of learning is that it prevents students from using AI adeptly. Writing a good prompt requires an understanding of the subject being explored. The prompter needs to know the context of the prompt. The development of that kind of understanding is exactly what a reliance on AI impedes. ... The tool’s deskilling effect extends to the use of the tool itself.