Using AI to answer a question is not necessarily preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding. The use of AI is a skill in the same way that any ability to look up information is a skill. But blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results is very different from using AI as a resource in a similar way one might use a book or an article as a resource.
I generally agree. That’s why I’m no longer banning AI in my courses. I’m allowing students to use AI to explain concepts, help debug, or as a reference. As a resource or learning aid, it’s fine or possibly even great for students.
However, I am not allowing students to generate solutions, because that is harmful and doesn’t help with learning. They still need to do the work and go through the process, AI assisted or not.
This is a particularly long winded way of pointing out something that’s always been true - the idea that you should learn how to do math in your head because ‘you won’t always have a calculator’ or that the idea that you need to understand how to do the problem in your head or how the calculator is working to understand the material is a false one and it’s one that erases the complexity of modern life. Practicing the process helps you learn a specific skill in a specific context and people who make use of existing systems to bypass the need of having that skill are not better or worse - they are simply training a different skill.
I disagree with your specific example here. You should learn to do math in your head because it helps develop intuition of the relationship between numbers and the various mathematical operations. Without a foundational understanding of how to do the basics manually, it becomes very difficult to tackle more complicated problems or challenges even with a calculator. Eventually, you do want to graduate to using a calculator because it is more efficient (and probably more accurate), but you will be able to use it much more effectively if you have a strong understanding numbers and how the various operations work.
Your overall point about how a tool is used being important is true and I agree that if used wisely, AI or any other tool can be a good thing. That said, from my experience, I find that many students will take the easy way out and do as you noted at the top: “blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results”.