AI giving you the answer isn't the same as knowing it — ownership is proportional to time invested
via A CS Professor on Why Slow Learning Wins in the AI Era | CU Boulder, Tom Yeh
AI-generated writing.
Tom Yeh puts it directly: “Whether you own something, you value something — it’s actually proportional to how much time you spend on acquiring that piece of knowledge.” Buying a degree, earning a certificate, or prompting AI all produce the artifact without the ownership.
What he cares about as an educator isn’t whether students remember the transformer equations a year later — he expects they won’t. It’s that they once tried: stayed in the library for hours, attempted to open the black box. That willingness is what differentiates someone who invested from someone who didn’t. The specific content fades; the self-knowledge that you can learn something hard doesn’t.
This is close to the IKEA effect, but with a stronger claim: it’s not just that you value what you built — it’s that you know what you built in a way you can’t fake or shortcut.