Today we’re addressing a question that many students and learners are currently grappling with:
If artificial intelligence creates flashcards for me, am I saving time or depriving myself of learning success?
AI tools can now generate entire sets of flashcards in seconds ā concise, clear, seemingly perfect. What used to take hours now happens with a single click.
But it is precisely this shortcut that is the problem.
From a learning psychology perspective, it is not the result ā i.e. the flashcard itself ā that is the actual learning process. It is the journey to get there.
When creating index cards, something crucial happens in the brain: we actively process information. We have to select, reduce and formulate.
Cognitive psychology refers to these processes as āelaborative processingā and ādeep codingā.
The more we think, connect and structure when creating an index card, the more deeply we anchor the knowledge in our long-term memory.
However, when AI takes over these thinking steps, this cognitive effort is eliminated.
To put it bluntly, the brain remains idle.
We consume learning material instead of constructing it.
Learning is an active construction process.
According to theories such as constructivism or Craik and Lockhart’s ālevels of processingā approach, the deeper we process information, the better we retain it.
This happens, for example, when we formulate concepts in our own words or explain connections.
Index cards that we write ourselves force us to do this:
We have to think about which wording is concise, which content is important, and which examples help us to remember it.
All of this activates semantic networks in the brain ā connections that later help us to recall information.
AI-generated index cards, on the other hand, offer ready-made formulations.
They save us the trouble of selecting, rephrasing and wrestling with understanding.
In short, they relieve us of the cognitive work that actually makes learning effective.
Another point is the so-called illusion of competence ā the illusion of knowing how to do something.
When we read perfectly formulated AI cards, it’s easy to get the feeling: āThat sounds clear, I already know that!ā
But this recognition is deceptive.
Only active retrieval, i.e. self-testing, shows whether knowledge is really retrievable.
If flashcards are created by machine and then only read passively, the knowledge remains superficial.
We recognise it, but we don’t really know it.