FLUENCY WITHOUT LEARNING: HOW AI-INDUCED COGNITIVE EASE DISRUPTS THE MECHANISMS OF DURABLE EDUCATION

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence is transforming how students learn by providing instant explanations, personalised guidance, and rapid feedback. These features create the impression of accelerated understanding and often lead learners to believe they are mastering material more quickly than before. Yet research on learning suggests that this impression may be misleading. Durable knowledge is built through productive struggle and desirable difficulties, which require effort, confusion, and active cognitive work. When AI removes these conditions, learning becomes easier in the moment but shallower in the long term. This paper examines how AI shortcuts the processes that support deep learning, how fluent output generates a powerful sense of cognitive ease, and how that ease produces an illusion of mastery in which confidence grows faster than competence. The analysis shows that AI can improve performance while quietly undermining the mechanisms that create lasting understanding.