AI ISN’T YOUR BRAIN

FALSE. She had not memorized the answers, she was not retaining anything, relying only on the machine to answer the questions.

TRUE! The AI gave her the correct answers, which gave her the illusion of mastery, without effort of understanding or memorising. By copying the AI without thinking, one develops neither memory nor critical thinking. AI is just a tool, a machine: it can help you, but it is up to you to reflect, to think for yourself, to ask yourself questions. That is how your brain learns! Just like athletes train their muscles, the brain must be trained daily to remain effective. AI can help understand certain points of a lesson, help us structure an answer, ask you questions to check that you have retained your learning. Only active learning allows for long-lasting retention.

FALSE. She never revised with her friends. She only relied on AI to provide answers to questions. It’s risky for your grades, especially if the AI ‘hallucinates’.

FALSE. Although enjoyable, jokes do not promote learning.

TRUE. Revising in a group involves explaining, asking questions, rephrasing: it really helps to understand and remember longer. Interaction is important. Revising in different places is also good for memory. And asking questions in varied contexts makes memories stronger! Everyone has their own method to learn: some need to read over several times, others need to write and make notes, others need to recite out loud. This requires knowing yourself and thinking for yourself to create connections between our knowledge in our brain.

FALSE. There is no magic technique; the only good method is to work your brain.

FALSE. This is a myth.

TRUE. AI needs huge servers that run 24/7 and consume a lot of electricity. To train an AI model, data centers use thousands of processors. And, a lot of water is needed to cool these enormous servers. All of this uses our planet’s resources*. Some people are very worried about the use of these resources and climate change. This is called eco-anxiety.

* Asking a question to AI is like turning on a small LED bulb for several minutes. Once, is not much… But if AI receives millions of questions every day, it’s as if all the lights in a large city stayed on all the time.

FALSE. AI can respond when the question is properly asked. However, for a simple question, a search engine is just as effective as a prompt and consumes less electricity.