On: AI is becoming more common in uni courses. What can students gain and what...

8 September 2026

Here’s what bothers me about this debate. Everyone is arguing about whether students learn from an AI tutor as well as from a human one. Wrong question. The interesting question is: what is learning, physically, in the student’s head?

I used to watch this in the lecture hall. A student would copy my derivation off the blackboard, perfectly, and understand nothing. Same symbols, zero physics. Then another student would interrupt me mid-sentence with a dumb question - “wait, why can you just add those?” - and suddenly the whole thing would click for the entire room. The interruption was the education. Not the words.

So when someone says an AI generates “the same words as a teacher but the interaction isn’t the same,” I want to grab them by the collar and say: you’ve almost got it, but you’ve got it backwards. The words were never the point. What’s the mechanism? A good teacher gets confused by your confusion. The student’s struggle feeds back into the explanation, in real time, and the teacher is sometimes wrong and has to fight their way out in front of you. That fight is the lesson. Watching a mind repair itself - that’s how you learn that understanding is something you do, not something you receive.

Now - can a machine do that? Maybe, eventually. I’m not going to pretend I know it can’t; nature doesn’t care about my sentimental attachments. But here’s the test I’d apply, and nobody in these articles applies it: give the student a problem the AI gets subtly wrong, and see if the student catches it. If the student can’t catch the machine’s error, the student hasn’t learned physics. The student has learned obedience to a very fluent oracle. That’s not education. That’s training a new kind of priest.

And the loss? It isn’t the teacher’s job. It’s the discovery that authority can be checked. You can only learn that by checking something yourself.

Fluency is cheap. Understanding is expensive. Never confuse the receipt for the purchase.