dont you gain skills with ai? it teaches you how to do stuff, you ask it questions, etc like a tutor?

Perhaps if you're the highly motivated type who would excel even without ai. But it's far too easy to become like maths students who learn only how to use a calculator instead of how to actually add fractions.

Learning and suffering seem to be linked to some degree. It takes a lot of up front pain to get to a point where you can become an effective autodidact. You have to develop an appreciation for the game. AI can accelerate aspects of this, but it often alleviates too much suffering for a novice to develop the fundamentals.

If you go into AI as a way to get your school work done more quickly, you won't experience the friction you need to. AI should be used to make the work longer and deeper. More engaging and adapted to the individual. Not quicker and easier.

The problem is that AI is the most effective dual use technology we have ever created with regard to education and cheating at education. The monkey brain doesn't like to suffer, so on average I think we find most people tend toward the shittier use case.

Theoretically yes, in practice it's like 0.001% of people who are able to use it this way.

We saw the same thing with the Internet. Infinite knowledge, all at your fingertips. So surely everyone becomes doctors and everyone can program right? No more university needed?

Turns out no. The bottleneck has never been information, the bottleneck is you.

Do you think that's how most students are using it? Teachers would quickly disabuse you of that notion [0]:

> In study hall, I watched a kid use Snapchat to take pictures of his computer screen. He was working on IXL skills. His Snap A.I. friend sent an immediate reply. He then clicked the answer on his screen. The next question popped up, he took a picture and got an answer. He swiftly went through the whole session this way. His right hand held the phone, he tapped the camera button, glanced at the reply, and his left hand entered the answers on his laptop. He didn’t know I was watching, but I saw the gold medal of 100 percent mastery bloom on his screen. I told the teacher who assigned the IXL. She didn’t realize Snapchat had an A.I. that would do her homework. It can answer all the questions.

... Now, can you use AI to learn things? Sure. But what the article is talking about it is critical thinking:

> Adults using AI mostly just sound generic. But for a child who never formed independent reasoning, "generic" is a major identity problem. The model’s reasoning doesn’t compete with the child’s reasoning but becomes the child’s reasoning. For children still building out the cognitive skills for evaluating the world, the effect will not be temporary but have a foundation impact on their thinking.

American's performance with critical thinking is already mixed at best. A new generation with even lower independent thinking ability combined with AI painstakingly engineered to suffer from severe bias is a powerful recipe for (even more) horrors beyond human comprehension. Paid for by our tax dollars.

0 - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/learning/teachers-on-how-...