Learning Is Hard. AI Is Easy. 6-7, Folks
June 11, 2026
AI is prone to hallucination which is another term for taking digital drugs. AI is a prediction system, happily regurgitating what has been converted to vectors. If the algorithms are not smart enough, whiz kids will write software wrappers to fix up problems that arise. Sort of.
In today’s zip-zip world what is a college student supposed to do? Read books? Use an old-fashioned card catalog? Let AI do the work and hit the local pub?
Aaron Tay wrote “AI Academic Search And The Missing Middle Of Literature Discovery.” Librarians are unimpressed with AI search and rightly so, because it removed the sources from the search. Here’s what Tay found in his own query:
“In my own testing particularly for difficult queries, the difference is often visible in the first screen of results: the better AI search tools place relevant work high in the ranking, while conventional databases often require more query reformulation and screening before comparable papers appear. For example, I recently ran a study on reproducibility, running the same query five times across multiple AI search engines. It was not even meant to compare AI search engines relevancy but even with a broad query that had 200+ possible relevant results, only Undermind maintained high precision down to rank 50.
He added:
Other respected AI search tools could barely manage this for the top 10 to 20, showing the variance in performance. For “hard queries” the difference was even more stark between AI search tools and conventional databases.”
Tay also summarizes more of his findings:
“Freshman undergraduate work: mid-to-high precision, recall does not need to be high. Almost any database with the right coverage will do.
Evidence synthesis: high recall is non-negotiable, and you accept whatever precision you can get. Multiple sources, documented strategies, traditional databases plus maybe AI tools as supplements.
Narrative reviews: moderate recall for the time spent, high early precision, and strong top-ranked relevance. This is where the better AI search tools sit, and it is the use case where librarian voices are thinnest.”
In other words, perhaps there is something missing AI-infused search? I wonder if the old-fashioned methods will return to favor for students who want to learn? AI strikes me as a complementary tool to standard information literacy.
His findings verify that a mixture of the old and the new is the royal road to information literacy. That’s easy to say. Even some “smart” students struggle to read. Or, as GenZ says, “Learning is high key stressing.” Okay.
Whitney Grace, June 11, 2026
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