Artificial intelligence chatbots may be helping students finish their homework, but they could also be making them worse at learning, AI pioneer Andrew Ng warned at the NDTV World Summit, citing research that found students using AI scored 17% lower on assessments.
Andrew Ng said the growing dependence on AI tools for academic work could leave students with weaker knowledge and understanding, even as their immediate performance on assignments improves.
Andrew Ng’s warning highlights a key challenge for schools and universities as generative AI becomes increasingly accessible. Students can use chatbots to explain concepts, solve mathematical problems, write essays and generate computer code in seconds. But producing a correct answer is not the same as understanding how to arrive at it.
“If you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime, or over many years, of a student in school, I think if we don’t change that, we will be on a trajectory to graduate students that know much less,” he said.
“I Will Not Hire A Software Engineer Who Doesn’t Know How To Use AI”
He said it was still possible in many places to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in computer science without having used an AI coding assistant or interacted with a leading AI model through an application programming interface, or API. “It’s unfortunate that today it’s still possible in many places to get a bachelor’s degree in computer science without ever having used an AI coding assistant or ever made a call over the internet (called an API call) to a leading frontier AI model,” Ng said. “Today, I will not hire a software engineer who doesn’t know how to use an AI coding agent,” he said.
