AI, Laziness, and the Future of Learning
Remember the stories about having to pay someone to do your homework for you? Now those poor smart kids are out of a job because large language models have stolen their gig.
I never resorted to paying someone to do my homework. As a solid B student, I did just enough and rarely any more. I’m certainly not proud of it, and my lack of academic seriousness means that I’m still terrible at anything beyond rudimentary math. But maybe I’m still the lucky one, because my generation never faced the temptations that this current generation of students are facing with AI.
Chen et al. (2025) make a good case for ways that AI are being carefully integrated into L2 language learning in ways that are having meaningful positive effects on language acquisition; however, they also highlight two key dangers that have to be mitigated. The first is diminished skills acquisition by over-relying on AI to do the work. He calls it cognitive offloading and is a form of laziness. The second concern is misinformation; implicitly trusting the output of AI can lead to careless mistakes. These two issues are going to be the fundamental challenge educators face for the foreseeable future.
Governments and institutions are just starting to respond, Educators and researchers around the world realize that the pace of AI adoption is outstripping the guardrails needed to prevent genuine harm to students using these tools inappropriately. The OECD is working quickly to set digital literacy policies and best practices that will allow teachers to design curriculum that uses AI in collaborative ways that don’t degrade the learning experience(OECD, 2026).
AI is making the once simple concept of assigning homework that gets students to practice skills at home, into something much more complicated. According to the OECD (2026), teachers have seen achievement on homework dramatically improve as students rely on AI to solve homework tasks, while scores on in-class tests that don’t allow for AI assistance have seen a dramatic fall. This seems to be a clear indication that students are offloading the work to AI and not internalizing the skills effectively to manage tasks without AI.
The temptation to make life easier is something we all face. AI is just the newest technological advancement that can make life’s tasks faster and more efficient. But if we lose the ability to perform the skills without the technological assistance, then we become ever more dependent on technology and less individually skilled. If translation apps, for instance, make it less necessary to learn a second language, it takes away all the value that the learning process provided. Cross-cultural communication would be more efficient but less deep and meaningful.
I have hope that the implementation of AI into teaching pedagogy can be done in a safe and beneficial way. It may take a while, but I think that teachers, students, and society as a whole will find a balance between convenience and worthwhile knowledge acquisition. Having AI do your homework for you will not get you what you truly need: an education worth having.
Sources:
Chen, H.-J., Hsieh, F.-C., & Yen, Y.-C. (2025). Applying AI Technologies in Second Language Learning. In G. Y. Qi, Y.-J. Lan, & D. Chun (Eds.), AI-Mediated Language Education in the Metaverse Era (pp. 101–118). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-95-0245-5_6
OECD (2026), OECD Digital Education Outlook 2026: Exploring Effective Uses of Generative AI in Education, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/062a7394-en.
