Is it bad to use Ai for study purposes?

[skeet5]

Hi, is it really that bad to use ai (I use Gemini) for study purposes? I use it to understand a topic, to summarise text I am trying to understand and learn, sometimes to explain the topic I am studying or convert the text it into simpler sentences. I know Ai is bad and I want to stop using it but I just keep coming back to the ai because it helps me sometimes and it is saving me a lot of time. Please can you make me understand why should I or shouldn't use ai for study purposes? Thank you

Why do you think people who use Google have critical thinking skills and people who use AI do not? It's perfectly possible to apply critical thinking skills to both tools.

it can hallucinate as others have said and also has confirmatory bias- it will essentially try and tell you what you want to hear.

That being said used in moderation it’s a perfectly valid learning tool - but like most learning tools it’s only as good as the person using it.

I assume you are incapable of determining which are high, and which are poor, quality. Not all peer-reviewed journals are created equal.

Instead of looking at high quality journals, and then using your critical thinking skills to assess the quality of the article and identify gaps/limitations etc you are going with ever less reliable sources of genAI, wikipedia and books.

Except most students seem to be using it instead of learning.

as a starting point before i get to the journals, my thinking is cover the basics first

thats why i use cross combination of grok and then chatgpt

Obviously they don't necessarily have critical thinking skills. That is why I said they will hopefully be using them. At least if you find an article and read it there is some chance of you using them

AI is terrible. A study showed it gives bad or nonexistent information 80% of the time. Not recommending this, but smoking cannabis while watching you tube videos would probably give you a more accurate understanding of any topic than asking AI.

You really think that using two different genAI tools makes it all accurate?

Except with genAI, you are quite likely missing many of the basics.

This is very short-sighted - it is perfectly possible to direct AI in such a way to only return results from reputable peer-reviewed journals for example. Or set multiple parameters quickly in the same way that you would do with boolean operators on a standard database search for eg, author, year etc.

Then you independently verify their suggestions and then you have additional starting points with the ref lists from those studies etc etc.

You just do it with 4x plus the speed, so you can dedicate more time to other aspects of academic writing.

can you clarify what you mean? For some as using it and learning from it aren’t excludable.

no but it gives better odds that one will correct the other if needed

It’s better at binary right or wrongs I think.

🫤 no.

possible but then ive already used the eg make a list of essay titles for understanding the stock market 101, or the history of the cold war etc then i ask for advanced essay titles then expert level titles and so on

Grok is wrong 94% of the time ChatGPT wrong 78% of the time.
That’s like asking the Tweedle twins for a correct answer.

In my (biased) view, @OchonAgusOchonOh you can't argue with stupid.

early models may be, but now, then i respectfully dont think so plus in my view it depends on the subject matter

The point is, the kind of "objectivity" you seek does not exist - all scientists will tell you that. Maybe read Karl Popper?

There is no human activity free from "influence."

What GCSEs are you studying at the moment, @ApriloNeil2026 ? Have you got past Year 7 yet?

that is true,

Yeah.

I think I need to get of this thread as it's not good for my blood pressure. I deal with enough students who don't seem to want to do anything that involves critical thinking in my day job. I don't need it here too.

I know @OchonAgusOchonOh - and the deep, sad irony is, they're losing all the skills that would mean they'd be employed instead an AI agent. Things only humans can do - critical independent thinking; creative thinking; applying a range of human skills knowledge and emotions, embedded in specific cultural contexts, which AI cannot do.

It's lazy.

It's a shame you haven't addressed any of my points, why is that?