Framing AI as a Learning Tool and Reassessing Learning

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This paper will investigate AI technologies as learning tools, with particular focus on chatbots used for the development of language abilities. Using contributions to ethics and social epistemology, particularly regarding moral development I will argue that since AI tools only foster learning in the narrow sense of a skill, which aligns with utility and instrumental rationality, they can lead to epistemic corruption, which is enabled by epistemically vicious institutional practices. I will further draw on work on the functions of education to argue that AI tools by themselves cannot sustain any of the main functions of education – self-sustenance, democratic citizenship, or self-edification – while being able to contribute to them. As a result, both delimiting uses of AI that support learning as opposed to simply feigning it, as well as assessing its interactions with other methods and tools requires reconsidering the practice of learning and what it amounts to in education institutions and beyond.