I recently got into a debate with a friend who swears is “Against AI Slop”, but uses AI for 90% of his researching stuff. When i point it out, i got a 20 minute rant about how AI helps him learn and makes him learn faster, but i see massive issues with this. For once, using AI even as a starting point is a gamble, if not a straight damage to the learning process as a whole, mainly because sloppified information spit out by an LLM is often simplified, imprecise and oversimplified. For example, he told me to be interested in Arch Linux, but said the Arch Wiki was too “difficult to understand and took knowledge for granted” and told me that AI helped him understanding it. However i think that the wiki being verbose and designed to not be understandable by everybody is a filter to make sure that you don’t go and use Arch if you can’t understand the wiki, not for gatekeeping, but because a sloppified and short version of processes explained in the wiki will result in you knowing WHAT to do, but often not HOW and WHY. Also, it keeps you locked to AI since if you get used to the simplification (and often misinformation) given by the slop generator, it’ll be hard to understand the real sources, and it’ll be hard to learn the jargon and will lead to an incomplete result. I could go on for days and feel free to debate me, but I am tired of pretending that AI is a great learning tool. It can be, but in its current status it’s just not, and when it can be, IMO the other cons that come with AI usage outweigh the possible value of the info.
i never said that, maybe i worded it poorly. What I’m saying is that simplifying a wiki article is detrimental to learning because it paints a wrong image. If i get a slop answer to a question about a wiki article I’m effectively avoiding the learning process that’d lead to me being more capable to maintain my system more effectively, not to mention that it teaches me to seek answers instead of taking the quick, risky and immoral shortcut. Sure, i guess AI can make it easier to understand, but these hobbyist pieces of software are meant to be used carefully by people who are willing to spend time to use them. If you don’t want to read the wiki, It’s okay, use something else, but using AI will eventually lead to issues.
As for the rest of what you said (my bad if i misunderstood), i think that if the only useful use of AI in education comes AFTER learning the basics, it is essentially just useless, since if you manage to know the basics you are clearly able to go further