AI Is Not Your Replacement—It’s Your Sparring Partner

OPINION

Miguel Lucas, global senior director of innovation at LLYC

The problem with our youth using AI to do their homework isn’t that they are copying. The real issue is that they might never actually learn how to think. Can we do anything about it?

A few days ago, representing Fundación José Antonio Llorente, I stood before hundreds of teenagers at a Talent Session organized by the Princess of Girona Foundation, speaking about AI and employability.

I shared a statistic with them: 83% of students who use ChatGPT to write a paper cannot provide a single correct citation from those texts just one week later. Not one. I asked them: Is that learning, or is it just putting on a performance?

Cognitive science has a name for this: “cognitive foreclosure.” A young person who delegates a task they haven’t yet learned to perform independently doesn’t just lose a skill—they never build it in the first place. It’s not a muscle that atrophies; it’s a muscle that never forms. And that weakness can have permanent consequences on their reasoning ability and the formation of their intellectual identity.

I didn’t tell the kids to stop using AI (that would be like banning calculators). I told them what I repeat to my own children: the key isn’t to stop using it, but to learn how to leverage it without letting it nullify you. The difference lies in a metaphor: AI cannot be your secretary; it must be your sparring partner. The partner in the ring who hits back, who forces you to think faster and defend yourself better. If you only hit the punching bag, you never improve. You need someone to challenge you.

Here are two of the keys I offered them:

1. Don’t ask for the answer. Ask for better questions. Instead of saying “write me an essay on climate change,” try: “I want to argue that [this]. Give me the three strongest counterarguments so I can anticipate them.” That is using AI to think MORE, not LESS. The effort of refuting those counterarguments belongs to you—and that effort is exactly what builds the muscle.
2. Look for the AI’s mistakes. Occasionally, it invents data with total confidence. It cites studies that don’t exist. It constructs arguments that sound flawless but, if you pull the thread, are built on nothing. Your job is to catch it. Read every response with suspicion, verify what doesn’t fit, and dismantle what seems too perfect. Every error you detect strengthens the only thing no algorithm can give you: your own judgment.

Because AI is an amplifier. Perhaps the most powerful one humanity has ever invented. If you plug in laziness, it produces absolute slackers. If you plug in emptiness, it returns emptiness with very good prose. But if you plug in curiosity, it produces more brilliant minds than any previous generation could have been.

Our children already have the amplifier turned on. What we teach them to plug into it will define their future.