Maybe good news for students though.

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Jeremy Hsu, tech reporter at Ars Technica, tells us that the retracted Springer Nature paper was cited hundreds of times. Clearly many thought that the AI takeover of education was a done deal:

“The paper’s authors made some very attention-grabbing claims about the benefits of ChatGPT on learning outcomes,” said Ben Williamson, a senior lecturer at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, in an email to Ars. “It was treated by many on social media as one of the first pieces of hard, gold standard evidence that ChatGPT, and generative AI more broadly, benefits learners.”

“Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags,” May 4, 2026

but

“In some cases it appears it was synthesizing very poor quality studies, or mixing together findings from studies that simply cannot be accurately compared due to very different methods, populations, and samples,” [Ben] Williamson told Ars. “It really seemed like a paper that should not have been published in the first place.”

Williamson also questioned the timing of the paper’s publication just two and a half years after OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022. “It is not feasible that dozens of high-quality studies about ChatGPT and learning performance could have been conducted, reviewed, and published in that time,” Williamson said. Over red flags”

The paper had scored half a million reads, which is some sort of bestseller status. One problem is that the public myth that chatbots will make us smart without effort remains even if its source is shut down.

Meanwhile, Sweden — hardly a laggard in up-to-date ideas — is cutting back on the whole digital learning thing. From Maddy Savage at the BBC:

“There’s been an increased awareness of the disruption that technology is causing in classrooms,” says Dr Sissela Nutley, a neuroscientist affiliated with the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who is amongst those who have raised concerns about the use of digital tools.

Nuttley says that pupils can lose concentration through seeing what other children are doing on screens. She also points to a growing body of international research which suggests reading texts on digital devices can make it harder for children to process information, and that heavy screen use can even impact younger pupil’s brain development.

“Back to books – Sweden’s schools cutting back on digital learning,” April 15, 2026

No surprise there. The idea that digital learning could just replace hand–eye–mind co-ordination in the physical world assumes that there is no connection between mind, brain, and body. In fact, they are a cord with three strands, not easily broken. Kids need to physically struggle with their letters and numbers as they learn the concepts.

If the machine is doing it, the kid isn’t.