Benjamin Riley takes a look at a recent study from China that examines the effects of AI on learning. The results are not promising.
Last week, a study titled “The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education,” authored by David Strömberg, Victor Lei, and Yanhui Wu, went viral after The Economist published data visualizations from the research paper. The preprint came out in June—not sure how I missed it—and uses data from approximately 27,000 Chinese students in grades seven to 12 to explore a straightforward question that has preoccupied me for several years: “How does self-directed use of generative AI affect cumulative learning over time in ordinary school settings?”
We will get into the details shortly, but here’s the headline summary of the results:
- Between 2023 and 2025, approximately 80 percent of all students started using generative AI, and after just five months of use, approximately 50 percent of these students engaged in “full homework outsourcing,” meaning, they essentially stopped doing their homework independently and used AI instead.
- Over time, this caused significant learning loss as measured both on monthly closed-book exams and via the comprehensive high-stakes exams that China uses to determine high school and college placement for students. On those tests, by the end of June 2025, overall student performance fell by 24% on the former and 18% on the latter, a massive decline.
- What’s more, there is no evidence—none—of any corresponding learning benefit arising from students using AI.
- As such, the researchers state plainly that “our findings show that generative AI, which is likely to become a prevalent technology for education, has a substantial negative impact on student learning.” (My emphasis)
Put simply, we now have rigorous, empirical evidence on the real world, long-term impact of students using AI. This research indicates that AI substantially harms learning for half of all students, what the researchers call the “Generative AI penalty,” and provides no discernible benefit to the other half. Again, by the time this study concluded, 50 percent of students using AI with regularity had fully outsourced their homework to generative AI. For these students, when at home, they just stopped thinking about their schoolwork.