AI comes up almost everyday over dinner at my house, much to my dismay. My dad uses AI as a key part of his workflow as a professional software developer, and is a strong supporter for learning to use it most effectively. While I think my dad is a genius and if it works for him I’m not going to say he shouldn’t use it, I think he lacks perspective on just how destructive AI can be to learning as a young student. He has been at the top of his field for decades, and already knows how to do what the AI does, the AI just makes doing easy or repetitive things more convenient. As a student though, AI totally disrupts the learning process by allowing for an easy way to escape the mental discomfort that comes from not knowing how to do something. AI definitely has its uses as a learning tool, but it can also deceive you.

To be clear, I am talking about generative AI like chatgpt or image and video generation. These tools are so powerful and can do basically anything that I can do. I find that they uniquely excel at computer programming over other tasks, but maybe that is because everything that I am trying to code has already been done so the LLMs have near-exact solutions to draw from. They are also pretty capable of solving math problems, but again those exact solutions may be online somewhere. I primarily use AI when coding as a quick way to search documentation to find the name function I’m looking for, or to find which libraries I can import to give me the functionality I want. My experience copying code directly from AI has been both good and bad. It can often can help me find bugs to fix them, but can introduce other problems with the logic of the program. It is also pretty terrible at performing and interpreting statistical tests and producing graphs, often making mistakes that can’t be fixed without just doing it myself from scratch.

AI is an extremely useful but also dangerous learning tool. Talking specifically about math, LLMs like chatgpt can pretty easily solve all but the most complicated problems I give it. It struggles a little with questions that are designed to trick you, like the financial actuarial problems that are designed to be as tricky as possible. Luckily, if I ask it to help me solve a problem, I can tell if it is right or wrong just by following the logic and making sure the steps actually make sense. What makes using AI for learning dangerous is that it can rob you of the struggle of working through a math problem. Being stuck on the same problem for several minutes can be frustrating which makes it enticing to reach for AI for help, but the difficulty is where all of the learning happens. Presumably, you are solving the problem because you want to get better at solving that kind of problem, and AI is devious in that it can convince you that you understand it, when in fact it steals away the experience of actually coming up with answers yourself. For me, this is the real danger of rampant use of AI in education. You lose the mental “time under tension,” and become uncomfortable with being confused and fail to develop the ability to figure out a solution. I see this when I help my little brother with his math homework. He can be so afraid to make a mistake, and if he doesn’t see the solution immediately he struggles to combine what he does know to find a path forward.

I have also used AI to help with writing. I think asking AI for feedback after you write your final draft is fine, and I find it offers good suggestions about sentence structure and clarity. Using AI during the outline and drafting, however, I think will lead to the ruination of your ability to generate, argue, and defend ideas. If you see the essay prompt, immediately think “I have no idea how to answer this”, and then ask AI for help, you’ve stolen away the whole point of writing the essay from yourself. Anyone can take an outline and expand it, that’s why AI is so good at doing just that. The main difficulty is coming up with your argument and structuring how you will make the point. The reason I have this blog is to practice my writing and thinking skills.

AI image and video generation is a really cool piece of technology, in that it is cool machine learning techniques make it possible. That said, I don’t see any reason why it should actually be used for anything at all. It creates the most generic, filtered, unexpressive images imaginable, which decreases the overall quality of every product it is used on. I’ve never seen a single AI image or video that I liked as art, other than “wow it’s incredible that mathematics and computation is so powerful that it can make this”. The only ones who benefit from this are the executives who can pay less for artists, the artists and all the consumers suffer.

I am very glad that I at least made it through high school before generative AIs were around and commercially available. My last two years of high school were all messed up due to covid-19, but at least I learned how to write and revise essays, take notes, and work through difficult problems. I think to use AI responsibly in learning you have to have a certain amount of maturity, self-discipline, and actual desire to learn. I definitely did not have that in high school.