I couldn't agree more. To me there's something a little infantile about the current obsession with give-me-what-I-want "AI". It's literally the first thing we learn to do with language as toddlers. And it's becoming the mainstay of Gen AI usage, from the kind of example given here to the image generators, music generators, and various other text-to-whatever-the-fuck generators out there. To me it shows a simplistic lack of focus on the mutli-modal depth of interaction humans actually use to make sense of the world. And it's also just lazy, from an R&D perspective and will likely continue to drive the business of Gen AI into the ground. It will eventually recover, but it will take genuine innovation in the areas of product and UX, extending way beyond anything currently on offer.

But your specific analogy also points out the need for a fundamental shift in eduction. The absurd corollary of your hypothetical is when the professor uses the same AI to distill down a bullet pointed list to evaluate the main ideas the student has discovered. So clearly the objective of teaching has to change, and the obvious place to anchor it is in creativity. By no means does this have to focus on the creative arts, but it's an eerie indicator of how clueless both governments and institutions have become to see the widespread axing of arts and eduction programs and funding... We appear to be moving rapidly in the wrong direction, imho.