The instinct of students is often to use AI to help with homework, even if they are not trying to cheat. And because off-the-shelf chatbots are a helpful assistant, rather than a tutor, they give you the answer and undermine learning.
Paper: cepr.org/publications...
AI is generally a weak fiction writer except for one particular kind of fiction (rich in impressionistic metaphor, staccato sentences, short & plot light, etc.) which it writes excellently. This happens to be a style that can sometimes do quite well in modern literary fiction short story contests.
This is good stuff, including some things that are much more sophisticated than what I wrote in paper long ago. What happens when we turn this sort of AI loose on past academic research at scale? Should we be doing that already?
I talk about the research on when AI undermines, versus supporting, thinking and learning here: www.oneusefulthing.org/p/choosing-t...
Since people are asking in the comments, Pangram has vanishingly small false positive rates in independent studies. This is at the expense of a decent number of false negatives. bfi.uchicago.edu/insights/art...
More evidence, from a large-scale study in China, that using AI hurts learning if it undermines mental effort. When homework time drops due to AI use, so do test scores.
Across studies, there is a clear theme: AI tutoring in support of classes is good, using AI to "help" with homework is bad.
The original paper, by the way: www.researchgate.net/publication/...
The interaction between AI & past scholarly work is going to get weird. Here I gave GPT-5.5 Pro a copy of my first published paper from grad school & asked it to find errors and update it
It found new data, analyzed it, created reproducible files, extended the key argument in a sophisticated way...
