Post by Dr. Jeffrey A. Greene, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Nowadays, when someone I’ve just met finds out I study how people learn with technology, they almost always ask: “Should people be using Generative AI (GenAI) or not?” That’s a tough question, with lots of dimensions to it*, but two key factors to answering it are: who is using GenAI and what they are doing with it. I created a graphic to illustrate these factors and provide some guidance.

The y-axis is a continuum from “novice to expert.” The research on expertise is clear: Most people can be an expert in only one or two areas, so for most topics, most people fall somewhere between novice and expert. For example, I am an expert in educational psychology, competent at cooking, and very much a novice when it comes to international politics. The “learning to performance” axis is the other continuum, and it captures what kind of goal a person has. The recommended ways to use GenAI differ if my goal is to learn new knowledge or skills versus to simply perform a task I already know how to do well or one that I just need to complete (e.g., how to update my smartphone’s system software), rather than learn deeply.

Let’s use a few examples to explore this graphic. As an educational psychology professor, here’s a prompt I........

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