The Expert Paradox of Using AI & the Importance of the Productive Struggle
Ethan Mollick recently wrote about the paradoxical nature of knowing when to use AI and when not to use AI in 15 Times to Use AI, and 5 Not To. Specifically, he wrote “AI is often most useful where we’re already expert enough to spot its mistakes, yet least helpful in the deep work that made us experts in the first place.” As an academic law librarian this struck me as an important thing to keep in mind while helping students navigate the quickly shifting information landscape AI creates.
For students, AI use may be counterproductive to the learning process. Mollick lists five instances when AI can be counterproductive and shouldn’t be used. Two times when AI shouldn’t be used jumped out to me as applicable to law students and the learning process – “[w]hen you need to learn and synthesize new ideas or information” and “[w]hen the effort is the point.” Law students need to read and synthesize information to develop essential legal reasoning skills. AI chatbots process and summarize information quickly, but efficiency is prioritized over learning. For law students – or anyone learning something new – this is detrimental. The effort of reading, synthesizing, analyzing, and applying information to a legal issue is part of the productive struggle law students must undertake. The struggle helps students reason through difficult concepts and develop a relationship with knowledge creation that is active, not passive. Productive struggle counteracts what Paulo Freire criticized as the “banking method of education” in which teachers possess all the knowledge and merely deposit it into students. In an information environment dependent on AI chatbots, productive struggle is diminished; chatbots possess all the knowledge (or want us to think they possess all the knowledge) and simply deposit information into the user. Users become passive recipients and students who use AI to summarize information miss important learning opportunities.