"I stepped out of a cab in Graz, Austria, at 10 a.m. with five very jetlagged hours to kill before I could check in to my hotel. I had a few options: I could have asked the person at the front desk for some things to do, or I could have Googled it, but instead I decided to use generative artificial intelligence (AI). In seconds, it produced a five-hour itinerary of Graz's top tourist sites, arranged in a walking order with built-in stops at recommended coffee and lunch spots. Generative AI can feel pretty miraculous when it does things like this, and it is easy to see why people are tempted to use it for other tasks, including for schoolwork and learning."
"The research is very clear: there are no shortcuts to getting good at something. You have to engage in what researchers call deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is slow, effortful, focused work on improving one's knowledge and skills, and everybody has to do it, even experts. You can deliberately practice on your own, but often you also need guidance and feedback from a teacher or coach. And when you do it right, deliberate practice feels difficult because it includes desirable difficulties-challenges that force you to improve your knowledge and skill."
Generative AI provides rapid, practical assistance for gaps in guidance or routine tasks when no teacher or coach is available. Mastery requires deliberate practice: slow, effortful, focused work that improves knowledge and skills and often requires feedback from a teacher or coach. Deliberate practice includes desirable difficulties that feel challenging and drive improvement. Replacing deliberate practice with generative AI—such as asking it to write a paper—short-circuits learning and lengthens the path to competence. Generative AI is best used to augment routine tasks or fill temporary guidance gaps, and its output should be verified later.
Read at Psychology Today
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