Though we've had great educations for many years before AI. The cost/benefit is still up in the air for ai use. I for one would not want to spend my time learning from the bot. I find the way it puts words together tiresome. To rely on it for my education, not withstanding its addicting affirmations etc. is not a clear win for me.

Both books you mentioned exist for the curious student. And a plethora of other books. With a good text book you aren't left on your own to figure these things out, the chapters explain the process you need to take to arrive at a correct solution. Combine that with working with your peers, office hours, educational videos, and so much more, and there is a lot for the student. (I mean these bots are trained on an already existing corpus of information)

But yes one could argue that using AI not as a means for answering a class's problems but rather to generate more exercises could be valid. Though I doubt students have a lack of practice problems these days.

I find AI is a bad communicator. So it is quite awkward to take advice on prose from a system that generates bad prose, though that could be possible. Still it is unclear, one would have to judge what benefits arise.

Now my earlier point was not that AI is not useful in any way. It is useful with code. Though there is the larger conversation on developer enjoyment etc in the age of AI coding--where the speed of AI generated code is expected, and developers are more alienated from aspects that made coding enjoyable.

Secondly it’s unclear whether shortcuts to many “answers” are wholly beneficial in many cases outside the academic sphere. Hence scandals when for example video educators use AI in their material. Or the general push back on AI writing, website design, etc. These answers are being pushed back on.

Why I bring this up is because a lot of LLM usage is geared towards building new software products. We one shot some product, and there is no journey, larger collaborated effort. And one may have the feeling "why doesn't this feel as good as building it without this tool".

LLM generated software seems to push every story to "I wrote some prompts and Claude spit this out". Perhaps that story if fatiguing repeated over and over again. And we're losing something.

It's like everyone is fighting for your attention. One argues that an educational video is what you should watch. Another argues that building some piece of software you could easily pay a $1-$10 but now custom built for you is a better use of your time.

Also there's the lottery aspect. Where you use Claude thinking that something you build may strike gold. So it becomes like one big addicting lottery ticket for builders.

Jokes aside, of course it’s trained on human text. The issue is that it has a specific tone which leads to formulaic sentence construction that is tiring. But the plus is that it’s easy to spot if you want to avoid AI generated text.