Does AI Really Make You Smarter?

There is a begging and almost pleading tone in the market today around AI adoption. Jensen Huang, Mark Benioff, and Bill Gates, each with their own vision of how AI is going to fundamentally and inexorably change the future of work, from superhuman ‘tutor and coach’ at your disposal to wholesale replacement of people with AI and Robotics. The reality of the false sense of benefits that AI creates was on full display recently as King Features Syndicate, leaders in mass market media, released their summer reading list to several unsuspecting newspapers.

It turns out that the authors on the list were real, but the books were mostly fake – fabricated by a Generative AI algo. Was it the case that writer Marco Buscaglia simply failed to ask the right question or did the AI ‘Hallucinate’ the list? Anyway, the freelance writer conveyed to The Atlantic that he neglected to validate the details populating the list. To make a pathetic situation even worse, no one on the editorial staff in the affected newspapers, like the famous Chicago Sun Times, seemed to have paid attention either. So, out came the list. It was only later that a selected few of the stalwart subscribers of the periodicals – people that read real books — started asking basic questions. 

We absolutely fail as an information technology industry if we create a world where AI makes people less intelligent, decreasing intellectual curiosity and disciplined circumspection. Andrew Martin, a professor of educational psychology and chair of the educational psychology research group at the University of New South Wales, was recently cited in Forbes that “The more you rely on generative AI to help you with your schoolwork, the less you might be inclined to meet up with friends in person or online after school to brainstorm around an essay.” Translation – if you rely on AI as the cornerstone of a thought provoking exercise then you are short circuiting the process of creating and learning. We would argue that it is also the case that relying on AI makes it far less likely that you would take up important questions where you need guidance with your teachers and professors either in or after class. If AI is going to serve humanity and not just the tech oligarchy that is marketing it like it is literally the next cure for cancer, the battle for hearts and minds of students is the hill to die on in our view.