Photo by Ralston Smith on Unsplash

A Brief Rant Against Using AI For Learning

Learning is work, and that work should be FUN!

I am all about making knowledge more accessible. But, there are different ways — some better, some worse — to go about this:

1. One way is to dumb things down. Not a fan.
2. Another way — especially popular with LLMs like ChatGPT — is to summarize the knowledge for you; in other words, appear to do the work of learning for you. I’m also not a fan of this option, as it frames learning as the passive consumption of knowledge, removing me from the active construction of knowledge. Learning isn’t about getting an answer to a query any more than teaching is about treating students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge. We know better.
3. A better way, I’d argue, is to use what know about human learning & cognition to make learning more accessible, to make it easier for me to figure it out and learn for myself. There many ways to do this (and AI — with some rigor and care — can be used as a tool in this way), but none of them take away the work of knowledge construction; this way still requires me to do the work, but… that work is interactive, playful, challenging, fun. In other words: Educational.

Learning has never been about being handed answers.

Let me frame all this a different way:

🎮 Video Games! 🕹️

Video games are fun precisely because they are challenging. Just challenging enough to arouse our brains, but not so much that we get overwhelmed.

Learning is the same. It’s about the arousal of attention. Video games have levels and progression mechanics, to keep things just challenging enough — to keep us learning. Playing is learning. Learning is play. Playing the game is the point. Being challenged is the point.

If we assume — wrongly — that the game is about the end state (or worse — the silly achievements), we might as well give everyone a big ol’ “WIN” button:

“Press this button to win the game.”

The same with learning: To really learn something, we have to do something with this newfound knowledge.

This is what I don’t see around the current euphoria of AI —

“Summarize this for me, I don’t have the time…”

…doesn’t equal learning.

Learning has never been about pressing a “Give me the answer” button. Knowledge — facts and information — may be more accessible this way, but without care we risk short circuiting the joy of real learning.

We can ask for answers all we want, but what do we get out of this, really? Learning — real learning — has never been about being handed knowledge.