As I started writing this article, I laughed as I remembered what happened when i was still in high school in a public library in Highfield, Harare. There was a particular topic I was interested in Physics, and the only way to get textbooks was to go to the public library as it was school holidays. I remember the topic very well, because it gave me flames back then. The topic was work, energy and power with its confusing definitions and calculations. The Highfield public library was stocked well (late 90s) and there were a few physics books I could use. I managed to get 3 physics books on that day which was a miracle as even getting one book was hard, let alone 3. I was happy that I was going to make progress. But my happiness was cut short when I realised that something was amiss. From the outside, the thick textbooks, looked fine and you couldn’t tell something was wrong. But opening the textbooks one could quite clearly see that some pages were missing and had been pulled out. The pages that had been pulled out included the very topic that had brought me to the library. And this was across the 3 textbooks I had found. To say I was annoyed, would be putting it mildly. I had to change plans for the day and switch to another subject, as I had already walked to the library, didn’t want to walk back without accomplishing something.

Switch to 2025. My son who is currently in year 4 had an assignment where they had to choose from a list of people who were historically important to the history of Australia. They were meant to choose the person, get some information about them and why they were important and find a few pictures, print everything out and glue them on a larger A3 or A2 paper. And how does he go about completing this assignment. He goes straight to ChatGPT and starts his research there. He compared the people on the list and choose Captain Cook. After that he started reading about Captain Cook and prepared his own hand-written notes. He then went to Google Image search, chose a few pictures that he liked and started organising how he was going to present this information on the A4 sheet. As I’m looking at all this, I’m thinking, are they even allowed to do this? Is this even right? He didn’t copy anything directly from ChatGPT but the fact that he used it as his starting point for his research and the fact that ChatGPT provided this information to him in an easily digestible manner without much fuss. This made my memory of the missing pages from the textbook even more funny and start in contrast.

This experience then made me reflect me ask myself, is this the dawn of a learning revolution, or the death of critical thinking?

As a technology person, I fully understand how technology can be used and integrated into our everyday lives for a more fulfilling and purposeful experience. However, this is learning, and there are caveats in learning that one must know of. This not only affects how students learn and absorb knowledge but also how this knowledge is tested for. I’ll try to look at both sides of the AI coin in learning.

The Boon Side (Pros)

On-demand tutor: Kids can get instant explanations at midnight before a test.

As explained in the story above for my son, he didn’t have to go to the library to get the information he needed. All he had to do was open his laptop and open ChatGPT and a few other browser tabs and he was good to go. What made this even better for him, was that ChatGPT gave him options to choose from and all he had to do was make a choice and start researching that choice. Anything he didn’t understand, he didn’t have to ask me but just talk to ChatGPT and it responded.

On another day, totally unrelated to any homework from school, he was asking and quizzing ChatGPT about volcanoes and lava. And he kept asking different questions and getting the answers he was seeking. He did this for a good 15 mins before he got tired and left the AI assistant alone.

Confidence booster: Students who are shy in class can ask “dumb questions” without fear.

This for students is a big thing. Not every student is confident enough to raise their hands in class to ask seemingly dump questions that everyone should know. For students physically in class, raising your hand to ask questions might feel like a shameful thing. But with an AI assistant sitting in your room, all that goes away. Students can ask away with no fear of anyone laughing or snickering for asking such questions. And the AI assistant doesn’t get tired to explain something even multiple times.

Accessibility: Free or low-cost help for families who can’t afford tutoring.

Not all families can afford tutoring and AI assistants can help by bridging that gap. Most families have some sort of internet connection, and this can then be leveraged to take advantage of AI assistants.

Efficiency: Students can check answers, get feedback, or find resources faster.

AI assistants are very fast and have access to the internet for up-to-date information. And they are also intelligent and can help students to confirm their answers before submitting assignments. They can even provide feedback to students to update their answers before submitting them for marking to teachers.

The Bane Side (Cons)

Shortcut culture: Copy-paste instead of learning.

This reason is the is most often cited reason why AI assistants are blocked for students. Because of the ease at which they generate content and research materials, it promotes students into a culture of copy and paste. This means the students will get better at prompt engineering which is the occupation or activity of writing instructions for an artificial intelligence program or tool to determine or influence the content that it creates. It involves using careful phrasing, context, and specific formatting to get accurate, relevant, and high-quality results from AI models like large language models. High quality prompts generate high quality results from AI assistants with students just copying the provided solution and pasting it into their assignments with zero application or learning. Instead of taking hours carefully learning and researching a topic and learning something new in the process of research, the AI assistant does everything in seconds. This is a bad!

Accuracy risk: AI sometimes makes stuff up (“hallucinates”).

I use AI assistance everyday in my everyday life and at work. At work I use it more as I find it speeds up my work quite significantly. However, one thing I have noticed is that AI assistants sometimes hallucinate and can suggest something to you with confidence and yet going completely off tangent. This is something that one has to guard against especially when working with AI assistants in a work environment where our code/software as software engineers ends up in vital systems that can literally mean life and death. With experience, I can easily identify that what’s being suggested is wrong or just utter rubbish. Students might not be able to realise this. They might not be able to discern that the AI assistant is wrong or giving wrong answers.

Having said that, hallucinations with these AI assistants has significantly improved, since the earlier wild west days when they were still novel ideas.

Dependency: Students may not develop problem-solving grit.

There are some things that students are made to do that might seem on paper are not important. But they actually are important as they teach students problem solving abilities. When given problems and a student applies their minds with no assistance, they use their frontal lobe more and increase their ability to solve even more complex problems. This is the whole foundation of learning. With all the problem solving moved to AI, this means students will not be able to increase their abilities to solve problems on their own.

This over reliance on AI will hinder the development of critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills. If ChatGPT is doing all your creative thinking, its means as a skill, a student will be developing.

Encourages Human Laziness

This is tied into the first point above. When given a lazy option and a difficult solution for the same problem, students and humans in general would want the easier and lazier solution. By encouraging students to use AI, it means to some extent, we would be encouraging students to be lazy and not apply critical thinking when required to.

Feeling of Isolation by students

If students interact just with AI or with AI assistants more than they do with their teacher, they can begin to feel disconnected and isolated as interacting with software can never replace the human closeness that teachers bring for the learning process. Students’ motivation and engagement may decrease, which could lead to an increase in dropout rates or low pass rates.

My Thoughts

I’m a tech person through and through and I can clearly see the advantages that students can get from using AI in learning. There are cons in doing so, but hear me out. We have been through this discussion before. Remember when personal computers and the internet started becoming prevalent in every day lives and in homes? This same question came up, asking if using computer benefits the students or not. Or whether students should use the internet in their learning. We all know how that turned out as we are living it today with computers everywhere in education.

This question was also asked when calculators became smaller and cheaper and easily accessible to everyone. The question was are we not making our students lazy by using calculators in their learning or doing their assignments? And it was answered that students can use their calculators in math and still be able to learn and teachers being able to mark work submitted by students. What evolved was how teachers now started marking and evaluating students work knowing full well that they will be using calculators.

I believe we are at the same point in our history again. We should allow students to make use of AI in learning and get all the benefits that they provide. We can then place mechanisms in place so that the cons of AI do not derail students from learning. This also means that teachers have to upskill to be able to take advantage of AI in their classrooms. This will include upgrading and changing curriculum that can assess students that have submitted work that is partially or wholly done by AI assistants.

Another thing to consider is that with guided use, AI can become powerful in the hands of students. The general idea is to instil in students the quest to learn more and get more information easily but still absorbing that information as opposed to using AI to finish assignments in short time without putting effort. Students still need to learn and absorb information. Old school research guarantees that during the research phase, students will be learning. But with AI the focus should move to having the AI generating the content and getting the students to assimilate this information by changing teaching methods.

When calculators became prevalent, teachers had to change their curriculum to take into consideration the use of calculators. It should be the same with AI. Teachers should focus on creating work for students that encourage thinking beyond what AI cannot instantly generate. Software tools are already being developed that can identify work that generated by AI tools. If students are made aware that these exist, it forces them to use AI as a starting point of research but allowing them to create and generate their own scholarly content from the learned research.

Popular tools like Turnitin which have been used to check for plagiarism in students works for almost three decades now, can now detect content generated by AI tools. This message should then be driven to students that plagiarism and blind copying of content generated by AI assistants is not acceptable and will be categorised as academic fraud.

In conclusion

My suggestion is striking a balance between using tech for everyday lives of students whilst also safeguarding the learning process

But before I finish, I will leave with this question:

Would you let your kid use an AI tutor or AI Assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, DeepSeek, Claude et all) daily? Under what conditions?

Feel free to comment below with your comments, or email me on beatnyama@gmail.com