The wish for an _AI revolution_ in learning seems to have been granted by a monkey's paw. Articles like this, or [0], or browsing r/teachers [1], or even talking close-ones in college, give a rather grim view of AI use.

A para from from [0] makes it seem that students understand that LLM use doesn't lead to learning, but still do so. Do they not see effort put into learning worthwhile?

  A few months ago, I overheard some college students talking about their classes.
  One was complaining about an assignment they needed to do that night, and
  another incredulously asked why they wouldn’t just have ChatGPT do it. The first
  replied, “This is my major, I actually need to learn stuff in this class. I use
  AI for my other classes.”

From what I understand tho, most of LLM use for learning is just LLM used as a tool for cheating. Even tfa mentions something of the sort:

  few of Musall’s most advanced students have taken advantage of AI to learn new
  topics. But, as far as she can tell, more students are using it to just find
  answers

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/to-teach-in-the-time...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/

You never realize the beauty of just learning cool stuff in college and exploring around until youre like 26 and graduated for 4 years

I don't even think it is a monkey's paw. That implies that it looked like it would solve a big problem in our initial estimation.

But "students will use the cheating machine to cheat" was obvious from the release of ChatGPT3. There was never some period of time where AI looked like it was a net positive for students only to be revealed to have an unexpected harm.

Even from the folks who claim to use LLMs to learn rather than cheat or avoid work, I've seen so many people admit that they are actually using it to harm themselves. "Oh, I only ask ChatGPT for the answer for really hard problems." Yeah man, doing the hard problems is how you learn.