AI Is a Floor Raiser, Not a Ceiling Raiser

Summary

AI is a Floor Raiser, not a Ceiling Raiser A reshaped learning curve Before AI, learners faced a matching problem: learning resources have to be created with a target audience in mind. This means as a consumer, learning resources were suboptimal fits for you: You're a newbie at $topic_of_interest, but have knowledge in related topic $related_topic. But finding learning resources that teach $topic_of_interest in terms of $related_topic is difficult. To effectively learn $topic_of_interest, you really need to learn prerequisite skill $prereq_skill. But as a beginner you don't know you should really learn $prereq_skill before learning $topic_of_interest. You have basic knowledge of $topic_of_interest, but have plateaued, and have difficulty finding the right resources for $intermediate_sticking_point Roughly, acquiring mastery in a skill over time looks like this: What makes learning with AI groundbreaking is that it can meet you at your skill level. Now an AI can directly address questions at your level of understanding, and even do rote work for you. This changes the learning curve: Mastery: still hard! Experts in a field tend to be more skeptical of AI. From Hacker News: [AI is] shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be useful. This happens quick for me. Also, god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly controversial subject and you want it to find reputable sources or particularly academic ones. This intuitively makes sense, when considering the data that AI is trained on. If an AI's training corpus has copious training data on a topic that all more or less says the same thing, it will be good at synthesizing it into output. If the topic is too advanced, there will be much less training data for the model. If the topic is controversial, the training data will contain examples saying opposite things. Thus, mastery remains difficult. Cheating The introduction of OpenAI Study Mode hints at a problem: Instead of having an AI teach you, you can just ask...