Because text-generating bots like ChatGPT offer an easy way to cheat on papers and other assignments, students’ embrace of the technology has stirred uneasiness, and sometimes despair, among educators. Teachers and pupils now find themselves playing an algorithmic cat-and-mouse game, with no winners. But cheating is a symptom of a deeper, more insidious problem. The real threat AI poses to education isn’t that it encourages cheating. It’s that it discourages learning.
To understand why, it’s important to recognize that generative AI is an automation technology. You can speculate all you want about computers eventually attaining human-level intelligence or even “superintelligence,” but for the time being AI is doing something that has a long precedent in human affairs. Whether it’s engaged in research or summarization, writing words or creating charts, it is replacing human labor with machine labor.
Thanks to human-factors researchers and the mountain of evidence they’ve compiled on the consequences of automation for workers,1 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.
