Answer to: Does AI help people learn faster, or just help them skip learning?

Neither of them. LLM (AI is very broad term) tools do what people usually do in the context. They are called a stochastic parrot because they have a compressed model of probabilities (statistics are analyzing data, probabilities are rules inference from the analyzis, and stochastic means that an algorithm considers the probabilities) It's the exact same thing when your company has a list of 5 colors they consider the clients are the only ones they want. It's a simplification of reality, to a point a continuum becomes discrete. Logic allows us to work on continuum, but algorithmic requires discrete (yes, even double-precision have a finite amount of numbers they can represent) So. LLMs only work when what you ask is already among the things that were deemed acceptable when the data was analyzed. Or very close to. If it's not close enough, the LLM will still deduce things, but the result is far from what you expect ( "hallucinate" ) . Selecting what is deemed acceptable is part of the training, after curating and annotating data, it's the neet part of the LLM. This does not mean that LLMs are bad. It means, they are not a generic cure-all. They are actually good at doing simple tasks that are still too complex for human people to spend time "patternizing", that is formely deducing a pattern for. For example, summarizing mails :) However, you also need to know when you are asking something that requires a specific human validation. This means, until you understand correctly the topic and how the LLMs addresses it, you should not trust the LLM at all . But this does not mean you should not use LLMs to learn. Actually, asking an LLM can give you a lot of information on what is possible to do - just don't trust it on its explanations. So, ask your LLM ; but always read the whole result and check anything that you are not already aware of. If your LLM uses a new library : what is that library ? Is it still maintained, is the code used the most recent one ? LLMs are just tools, they can be used however you want. Their promotion as a "dev replacement" is plain BS but that dishonest advertising should not make you simplify this tool to a "good/bad" false dichotomy.