I used an AI chatbot for my studies for a month. It never once said "I'm not sure."

Let me say this first so nobody calls me a boomer in the comments: I like these tools. I use one almost every week when I code, and I'm not going back. But last month I ran an experiment on myself. For about four weeks I tried to use an AI chatbot for everything study-related, and every time it got something wrong or fishy I wrote it in a note on my phone. I wanted to find the edges.

The note got long. Here's what I learned.

Where it was honestly brilliant

• Explaining the same thing five ways. I asked it why a capacitor stores energy using a water-tank picture, then a crowd-in-a-corridor picture, then "like I'm twelve". The third one clicked. A textbook only gets one shot at explaining something; this thing gets as many as I have patience for.
• Making me practise. "Ask me ten questions on Newton's laws, one at a time, don't tell me the answer until I try." This is the best use I found. It's like a friend who never gets bored of you.
• Cleaning up my own notes. I paste my notes and say "reorganise this into an outline, don't add anything." It doesn't need to know anything for that, so it can't lie much.
• Debugging. Python error messages are a lot. Pasting the error and asking "what does this mean in plain words" saves me twenty minutes.

Where it lied (with receipts)

1. The arithmetic that looked perfect. I asked for the range of a projectile launched at 30° with $u = 20\ \text{m/s}$. It wrote the correct formula,

$R = \frac{u^2 \sin 2\theta}{g}$

and then plugged in $\sin 30°$ instead of $\sin 60°$. So I got about 20.4 m instead of about 35.3 m. Everything around the mistake looked so tidy, units, rounding, a neat boxed answer, that I almost copied it. I only caught it because the number felt small for a 20 m/s throw.

2. The book that doesn't exist. I asked for a source for a claim about enzymes. It gave me an author, a title and a chapter number. I searched the library website, then the open web. Nothing. The book is invented. It sounded like a book that should exist, and apparently that was enough.

3. "According to NCERT..." I asked what NCERT says about a topic and it described a "Figure" and a "Box" with total confidence. My actual book has no such box. It doesn't have my textbook open in front of it. It writes something that sounds like NCERT, which is not the same thing at all.

4. Code that passes my tests and still breaks.

def avg_last(marks, n):
    return sum(marks[-n:]) / n

I'd asked for "the average of the last n marks". It worked on my three test cases. Then avg_last([70, 80], 5) returns 30.0, because it divides by 5 even though there are only two marks. The right answer is 75. When I asked "what edge cases did you miss?" it spotted the problem instantly. So it can fix it, but only if you poke it.

The scary part isn't the mistakes

Mistakes are fine. My own notes have mistakes. The scary part is that it sounds exactly the same when it's right and when it's wrong. A teacher says "hmm, not sure, let me check." A book has an index and a printed date. The chatbot has one tone, calm and sure, for everything.

And most of the errors in my note, I caught only because I had already studied that topic. Which means you can catch it only on things you already know. For a student that's a bit of a trap, no? The topics where you most want help are exactly the ones where you can't tell if the help is wrong.

Prompts that actually worked for me

Instead of...	I now ask...	Why it's better
"Solve this problem"	"Give me only the first step as a hint"	I still do the thinking
"Is my answer right?"	"What is wrong with my answer?"	It tends to agree with you if you ask the first way
"Explain photosynthesis"	"Explain it, then ask me 3 questions to check I got it"	Turns reading into practice
"Give me a source"	"Don't give sources. Tell me the keywords to look up in my book."	No invented books

My four rules now

1. Try first, ask second. If I haven't struggled with a problem for at least fifteen minutes, I've robbed myself of the part where learning actually happens.
2. Method, not answer. Hints beat solutions.
3. Every number gets redone by hand. Takes two minutes. I also make it write units at each step, because a wrong unit is the easiest lie to spot.
4. Facts get checked in NCERT or with a teacher. Names, dates, "quotes", anything it cites is a rumour until I find it myself.

One more thing

No chatbot sits next to you in the exam hall. Your own brain does. If I lean on the tool for a month and my own legs forget how to walk, I'd rather find out annoyed at myself now than at 9am on exam day.

If you've caught one lying, put it in the comments. I'm collecting them. My most embarrassing one is still the invented book.