AI Tools Tempt Learners to Skip the Basics, University Dean Warns

‘Sure, AI is a great tool, but for people who’ve never learned the basics, there is a temptation to sneakily use that instead of learning,’ Paul Darwen.

People stand next to a humanoid robot at an AI conference in Shanghai, China, on Feb. 21, 2025. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Artificial intelligence could sweep away basic learning opportunities for younger people if society becomes too reliant on the technology, cautions an AI researcher.

Paul Darwen, associate dean of IT at James Cook University’s Brisbane campus, said the advent of AI might be similar to previous inventions, such as calculators and spreadsheets, which relieve people from the “tedious drudgery” of menial work, while allowing them to focus on more creative endeavours.

“It’s like having an assistant who’s 12 years old and makes lots of mistakes, but it does speed up certain things,” Darwen told The Epoch Times.

“In the world of programming, things like [Microsoft’s chat service] Copilot, they’ve now spread very quickly, so people rely on them to do a lot of the donkey work for programming, freeing them up to think of the bigger picture and how it all comes together.

“So by that argument, sure, it’s great, [AI’s] going to be like calculators.”

However, the associate dean pointed out that generative AI is more powerful than a simple calculator, and could encroach on tasks that society should keep doing manually.

Pointing to the field of programming, he said it was challenging to teach young people basic programming when AI products could help them write code.

Paul Darwen, associate dean of IT at James Cook University’s Brisbane campus and the Liberal National Party candidate for Rankin. Courtesy of Paul Darwen

“But if [young people or entry-level workers] don’t learn the basics, how can they possibly learn the more sophisticated stuff?” Darwen asked.

“And so that’s one problem—the bootstrapping part for people who’ve already learned the basics.

“Sure, AI is a great tool, but for people who’ve never learned the basics, there is a temptation to sneakily use that instead of learning.”

The associate dean is currently running as the Liberal National Party candidate for Rankin.

Apart from popular AI chat services (ChatGPt, Copilot, Claude, and so on), tech companies have also developed AI “agents,” a type of product that could be the next frontier in its development.

According to developer platform GitHub, AI agents can will transform programming by automating many processes, including code reviewing, testing, code deployment, and vulnerability detection.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during an event highlighting Microsoft Copilot agents in Redmond, Washington, on April 4, 2025. Stephen Brashear/Getty Images

Young People May Not Need to Learn Programming: Nvidia CEO

Darwen’s remarks come as some well-known figures in the industry echo similar ideas.

At the World Government Summit in Dubai in February 2024, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said their kids didn’t need to learn programming anymore.

“Over the course of the last 10-15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this will tell you: it is vital that your children learn computer science, [and] everybody should learn how to program,” he said.

“In fact, it is almost the opposite. It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human.”

Huang further stated that everybody can now be a programmer due to the “miracle of artificial intelligence” and that upskilling will become more critical in the future.

“The country, the people that understand how to solve the domain problem in digital biology or in the education of young people, or in manufacturing, or in farming–those people who understand domain expertise–now can utilise technology that is readily available to you,” he said.

“You now have a computer that will do what you tell it to do.

“It is vital that we upskill everyone, and the upskilling process, I believe, will be delightful, [and] surprising.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote address during the Nvidia GTC 2025 in San Jose, California, on March 18, 2025. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

AI Could Stifle Creativity Across Many Fields

At the same time, Darwen did say one possibility was that AI could stifle creativity if society.

“AI can only mimic what was in the training data. It can mix those elements in different ways, but it’s limited to the elements that were in the training data, so it struggles with anything that is completely new,” he said.

“There is a possibility that if researchers rely on AI, it'll regurgitate existing ideas and thus implicitly blind them to something completely new that they might otherwise have thought of.”

Darwen said this situation now occurred in the field of art, where AI can be used to generate images in just a few clicks.

“Does that mean no new art will ever be created now that we will just endlessly rehash the art that was created up until the creation of these tools?” he asked.

“They’re training AI on the images that were generated by six months ago, and and the quantity of images generated by AI is now vastly bigger than the quantity of the original images created by human artists. And so it'll get crowded out.”