Fallibility isn't the problem. It's probably a net benefit for learning.
Promoting dependency is the problem. Replacing effort is the problem. Making self-discipline be a thing only for suckers is the problem.
Promoting dependency is the problem. Replacing effort is the problem. Making self-discipline be a thing only for suckers is the problem.
# The truly good teachers were primarily motivation agents, providing enough content, but doing so in a way that meant I fully engaged.
That's not to say that a chatbot couldn't emulate a tutor. I don't know how successful it would be, but it seems like a promising idea. In actual practice, that is not how students are using them today. (And I'd bet that if you did have a tutor chatbot, that most students would learn much more about jailbreaking them to divulge answers than they would about the subject matter.)
As for this idea that replacing effort not being a problem, I suggest you do some research because that is everywhere. Talk to a teacher. Or a psychologist, where they call it "depth of processing" (which is a primary determinant of how much of something is incorporated, alongside frequency of exposure). Or just go to a gym and see how many people are getting stronger by paying 24/7 brilliant private weightlifters to do the lifting for them.
My pushback is its very easy to tell a chatbot to give you hints that lead to the answer and to get deeper understanding by asking follow up questions if that's what you want. Cheating vs putting in work has always been something students have to choose between though and I don't think AI is going to change the amount of students making each choice (or if it does it won't be by a huge percentage). The gap in skills between the groups will grow, but there will still be a group of people that became skilled because they valued education and a group that cheated and didn't learn anything.
An LLM's job is not to give the child the answer (implying "the answer to some homework/exam question"), it's to answer the question that was asked. A huge difference. If you ask it to ask a question, it will do so. Over the next 24 hours as of today, December 5th 2025, hundreds of thousands of people will write a prompt that includes exactly that - "ask me questions".
> Learning can still happen, but only if the child forces it themselves.
This is literally what my original comment said, although "forcing" it is pure negative of a framing; rather "learning can still happen, if the child wants to". See this:
>In e.g. the US, it's a huge net negative because kids aren't probably taught these values and the required discipline. So the overwhelming majority does use it to cheat the learning process.
I never claimed that replacing effort isn't necessarily a problem either, just that such a downside has never been brought up in the context of access to a brilliant tutor, yet suddenly an impossible-to-overcome issue when it comes to LLMs.