Shadowing Practice: AI Is Stealing From You - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
1
AI is stealing from you.
2
And I don't just mean all the copyrighted works and movies
3
and books and art and blog posts and code and every other piece of content that humans have created.
4
They're stealing from you, the person watching this video.
5
And what I'm really talking about is the fact that when you use AI, instead of sitting with the problem or doing things manually the old way, you're losing opportunities.
6
AI is stealing your opportunities to learn.
7
It's stealing your opportunities to think and synthesize information as well as form your own opinions.
8
It's stealing your opportunities to develop determination and sit in discomfort
9
the development and nurturing of your problem solving and critical thinking skills.
10
And when you use AI for instant answers, it's robbing you from every opportunity to develop your brain's ability to do those things.
11
Now, I am going to rant a bit, but I'm also going to back this up with some research because it's not just me that's saying this.
12
There was a 2025 study called Generative AI Without Guardrails Can Harm Learning evidence from high school mathematics.
13
And in that study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania gave nearly 1000 students access to GPT -4 for math practice.
14
There were three groups.
15
In one group, students could use no AI at all, and in the other two groups could use AI.
16
But there were two versions of it.
17
There was one version that had no guardrails and basically would just give them the answers if they asked for it.
18
And the second version was a tutor version that wouldn't give people the direct answer.
19
It would kind of guide them to look it up and solve it on their own.
20
And what they found is that for the students that used AI without the guardrails, their scores initially went up 48 % compared to the group with no AI.
21
But then when researchers took that AI away for the exam, the students using AI with no guardrails scored 17 % worse than the group that had no AI at all.
22
The moment the AI was taken away, the advantage went with it.
23
Now, really my core argument here is that every time AI instantly solves a problem for you, when it finds an answer or creates a summary for you,
24
it removes part of the process that helps you grow.
25
And that convenience comes at a cost.
26
You have fewer opportunities to think, fewer opportunities to learn, fewer opportunities to struggle.
27
And the key thing here is that just
28
because some learning feels good in the moment doesn't mean any of it is actually sticking.
29
And that's not just theory.
30
In the math study that we just talked about, the kids who scored worse and used AI didn't even feel like they'd scored worse.
31
They thought they were learning just fine.
32
So when you get those instant answers, you feel like you're moving forward, but you're not actually retaining anything and you didn't actually get to sit with that information.
33
So you're not going to be able to recall it yourself in the future.
34
You're essentially creating a situation where you'll be entirely dependent on AI.
35
And that's the other thing to think about, right?
36
Our access to AI is probably the cheapest it's ever going to be.
37
And it's not something that everyone's always going to have access to.
38
So if you're not practicing those skills now, the moment you no longer have access to AI, you're not going to know what to do.
39
You're going to have blank screen syndrome.
40
You're basically going to be a zombie.
41
And so this is why I think you should invest in
42
and take the time to slow down and not use AI for everything.
43
Because those skills that you develop without AI are very hard to develop while using AI.
44
Now let's dig deeper into what exactly AI is stealing.
45
We already talked about how AI is stealing your ability to learn and retain information, but it's also stealing your ability to think and synthesize information.
46
And so the simple act of reading, comparing sources, forming opinions, and summarizing information are all acquired skills.
47
Right now, it's just so easy to ask AI to summarize an article for you
48
or ask it to extract out the main points, but you're missing that entire opportunity to do it yourself and form those skills yourself.
49
oh, big deal, we're gonna have access to AI all the time anyways.
50
But I really want you to analyze that perspective.
51
You're essentially saying that your ability to critically think
52
and do your work or do your schoolwork or do your job is now directly tied to an AI subscription
53
owned by a corporation.
54
And so what you're telling me is AI can do everything for me, so I'm just going to be infinitely subscribed to this AI corporation for the rest of my life.
55
And personally, I don't want that.
56
And I don't want to see a future where that's the case.
57
And the other aspect of this is synthesizing information and forming your own opinions.
58
That is a skill.
59
And if you're asking AI to do it for you all the time, You're just adopting AI's interpretation instead of developing your own.
60
And when you're adopting AI's interpretation, you're actually adopting the interpretation of the people that trained the AI,
61
the corporation, the people that own the model and slurped up all the data from the internet to train it.
62
and selectively choose which of those things would be trained on
63
and selectively choose how it would be fine -tuned to answer in certain ways.
64
So again, you can tell me, oh, I'm going to be able to do this
65
and I will have access to this tool for the rest of my life.
66
So why should I spend my time actually learning these skills?
67
But you also need to realize that you're basically tying your ability
68
to synthesize information and form your own opinions to a corporation, a literal money making capitalist entity.
69
And that means going forward, all of your opinions will be completely informed by them as well.
70
Now, the next thing AI is stealing from you is the ability to sit with discomfort.
71
Not knowing something is uncomfortable, but staying with that discomfort is what actually builds patience and curiosity.
72
And we know this from a very young age, right?
73
Kids are running around saying, "I'm bored, I'm bored !" But good parents will let their kids sit in
74
that boredom and figure out what to do with it.
75
They explore their curiosities, they get interested in building things with Legos
76
or learning about electronics or doing art or making up stories.
77
But all of these things
78
that children spend their time on result in better critical thinking skills
79
and better ways to just sit with themselves and this discomfort that is existence.
80
And when you immediately get answers back from an AI, you're completely robbed of that opportunity to sit with the discomfort.
81
And then again, over time, you'll reach a point where you're not even capable of functioning without that immediate guidance from AI.
82
And so I'm back to my previous point.
83
You're basically going to become a puppet for the owner of the AI model.
84
you'll immediately reach for the AI baby bottle instead.
85
Now, the last thing AI is stealing from you is determination and problem solving.
86
Solving difficult problems requires persistence, experimentation, and recovery from failure.
87
Not everything happens instantly.
88
And you only develop those abilities through deliberate practice.
89
And so if AI is handling every single difficult step for you, you're not building those skills to be able to handle those things on your own.
90
Now, there was a study from 2014 called "Productive Failure in Learning Math" by Manu Kapur.
91
And for this study, they had two randomized controlled trials with high school students learning math.
92
One group was taught the concept by a teacher first, and then solve problems after, And this is known as direct instruction.
93
and the other group attempted to solve the problems first, failed, and then they received instruction after struggling with the problems.
94
And the key finding was that both groups achieved the same level of procedural knowledge,
95
but the students who struggled and failed first developed significantly greater conceptual understanding and ability to transfer to novel problems.
96
And the number of different solution attempts students generated during the failure phase predicted their learning outcomes.
97
So the students who struggled didn't just learn different things.
98
They generated their own representations and solutions, even wrong ones.
99
And so the failure itself was the preparation.
100
And that's kind of the other thing that I'm getting at here is
101
that AI is literally stealing the ability for you to develop your brain.
102
The way that we learn and the way that we move throughout the world is based on previous experiences.
103
So when you give a go at a problem that you know nothing about, you're using your prior experience.
104
But that means you get to more deeply integrate it into your brain and how everything works.
105
Whereas, if you're just immediately presented with the information, let's say instruction from a teacher or let's say output from an AI, you don't have as many opportunities to link it back to prior experience,
106
which solidifies that more in your overall understanding.
107
And we actually already know what happens when you outsource cognitive skills to technology.
108
There was a study done on GPS.
109
Researchers at McGill University tested drivers and found that the more someone relied on GPS over their lifetime, the worse their spatial memory got.
110
And a three -year follow -up study showed the decline was steeper for heavier users.
111
So, they didn't start out as bad navigators, GPS made them bad navigators.
112
The brain stopped building mental maps because the phone was building them instead.
113
And so now ask yourself, if GPS can degrade spatial reasoning in three years, what is AI doing to your ability to think, debug, write, and reason after using it every single day?
114
Now, again, I want to push back against anyone thinking this new world of moving fast
115
and generating 10x code and getting instant answers is the best version of how we work.
116
I'm not arguing that everything needs to be a slog and you need to just stop using AI altogether.
117
My main argument is that AI's ability to remove every single point of friction steals every opportunity from you for growth.
118
Now, how can we fix this?
119
Well, I think one of the obvious answers is to stop being so dependent on AI.
120
Wrestle with problems.
121
Try doing it the old way.
122
Disable instant answers for search and
123
that will essentially force you into the old way of having to read the results
124
and pick which ones you want to click on.
125
And then from there, come to your own conclusions and really just spend that time solving your problems.
126
And obviously some of you have to work.
127
You have a job.
128
So you may say, well, I'm forced to work quickly now that we have AI.
129
But in an ideal world, you can talk to your managers.
130
You can talk to anybody at your company that cares and let them know, hey, I feel like my skills are degrading.
131
I actually want some time to work on me.
132
And so maybe you have two days a week where you say this is a no AI day.
133
Maybe you can make it a thing at your office or at your work.
134
Or you essentially say, we're going to struggle all day today, but then tomorrow we will use AI and it'll solve all the problems that we couldn't figure out today.
135
And another thing you can do is put your AI in tutor mode, and that is have it give hints and ask Socratic questions instead of giving direct answers.
136
I'll link some skills and prompts in the description that'll get you started with that, but evidence from the study I talked about at the beginning of the video showed
137
that AI tutor mode improved practice scores by 127 % compared to students using no AI at all.
138
So ultimately, AI was not the problem.
139
Using it as a replacement for your own thinking was the problem.
140
is if you've used it before you've even tried to think, you're paying that price that you can't see.
141
AI is stealing those opportunities from you.
142
And so really my call to action is sit with problems.
143
Don't just immediately reach for AI.
144
Don't let AI steal from you.
145
Now, I'm also going to leave you with a challenge.
146
So this week, I want you to just pick one hard problem in your work or at school, whether it's a bug, whether it's writing something, or summarizing things, or sending an email or researching a question,
147
and try and solve it without AI.
148
Sit with that discomfort because struggling is the mechanism for learning.
149
And also use those skills because the skills you don't exercise are the skills
150
that you lose because it steals from you one small opportunity at a time.
151
It steals an opportunity an opportunity to form your own conclusions, an opportunity to tolerate uncertainty,
152
and an opportunity to become more determined.
153
Alright, I'm done with this rant.
154
I'm tripping over my words.
155
Thank you so much for watching this video.
156
If you enjoyed this content, definitely subscribe.
157
Check out all the other stuff we got going on here on the syntax channel.
158
It's not just me ranting all the time.
159
But I'll catch you in the next one.
📺 Same Channel
B24
Can This Robot Be My Personal Assistant
High School StudentsUniversity Students+3
B21
I bought Black Market AI Tokens on Chinese Amazon
University StudentsBusiness English+1
C13
STOP Running Code On Your Computer
University StudentsBusiness English+1
C14
8 Tech Choices to Lock In Before Agentmaxxing
University StudentsBusiness English+1
C13
8 New CSS, JS and HTML Features You Should Know
University StudentsBusiness English+1
✨ Recommend Video
B21
33 sentences
THEY'RE HIDING THE TRUTH ABOUT AI
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B23
79 sentences
Can you learn English with AI?
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B21
20 sentences
How the Algorithm Hijacked Monkey’s Brain (Why Monkey Can’t Learn Online)
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B217
26 sentences
Advantages and Disadvantages of AI
IELTS PrepUniversity Students+2
B21
11 sentences
Kentucky student warns AI is taking over the classroom
High School StudentsUniversity Students+3
B21
386 sentences
Communicating the Future: Defining Where We Want AI To Take Us
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B21
69 sentences
We’re already using AI more than we realize
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B22
20 sentences
Is the AI Boom Just Another Bubble?
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B212
63 sentences
Claude Just Revealed AI's Biggest Problem
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B21
147 sentences
Could AI Become Dangerous? The Real Risks Explained
University StudentsBusiness English+2
C11
254 sentences
AI Will Create New Wealth, But Not Where You Think | Carnegie Mellon University, Po-Shen Loh
University StudentsBusiness English+2
B22
78 sentences
5 Things You Should Never Ask ChatGPT | Vantage with Palki Sharma
University StudentsBusiness English+2
About This Lesson
You're practicing English with "AI Is Stealing From You" using the Shadowing technique — a method originally developed for professional interpreter training.
Focus on sounding like the speaker — not just repeating words. With 15–30 minutes of daily practice, you'll build real-world speaking confidence.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.