IIT Kharagpur professor warns students against relying fully on AI for studies

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in studies, assignments and research has risen rapidly. Students can get answers and assignments prepared in seconds. However, a professor at IIT Kharagpur has warned that if students depend entirely on AI for every answer, they may drift away from the process of learning.

The warning has come from Plaban Kumar Bhowmick, a professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at IIT Kharagpur. He is also the principal investigator of the National Digital Library of India (NDLI). In a post on social media, he said AI can both affect students' ability to think and help build it, depending on how students use it.

According to Prof Bhowmick, AI should not be used merely to obtain ready answers. It should be used to understand a subject and to build the ability to solve problems on one's own. To explain the difference, he used two concepts, "cognitive offloading" and "cognitive scaffolding".

When students hand over the entire responsibility of thinking to AI instead of trying to understand and solve a question themselves, it is called cognitive offloading. For instance, if a student has AI produce a complete answer directly to finish an assignment and makes no attempt to understand it, the assignment will get done, but the essential knowledge will slip away.

The professor said that using AI is not wrong. What matters is how students are using it. If they take answers directly from AI instead of understanding the questions themselves, they may be deprived of gaining deep knowledge of the subject and of strengthening their own ability to think.

Cognitive scaffolding, by contrast, means supporting students while they learn so that they gradually learn to understand questions and find answers on their own. Here, AI gives hints instead of direct answers and helps students think in the right direction. According to Prof Bhowmick, students can use AI to understand questions and learn ways of finding answers, but the effort to find the answer must be their own. This improves their understanding, and later they are able to solve difficult questions on their own.

For this, Prof Bhowmick recommends the use of the "Fermi AI Tutor". According to him, instead of giving students direct answers, the tool helps them understand questions and find answers themselves. It motivates them to think, asks them to explore answers through different routes and, when needed, shows the right direction.

Prof Bhowmick said the tool is not merely a means of getting answers but works like a companion that helps students learn and solve their own problems. The "Fermi AI Tutor" is available free of cost through the National Digital Library of India (NDLI).

The use of AI in education is growing steadily. It is therefore important for students not to adopt it merely to complete assignments but to use it to understand subjects and learn new things. AI help will be beneficial only when students think for themselves and try to understand the answers to questions. With the right use, their ability to think, reason and solve problems on their own can improve further.