What chatbot mentors can't give you

The big picture: Increasing numbers of early-career employees and students depend on chatbots for answers because they have 24/7 access and because they see AI as a judgement-free zone.

• "Most of the interactions we're having with AI-enabled tutors are happening after 5pm, when a professor isn't even monitoring office hours," says Chris Hess, a former assistant professor at Butler University in Indiana and now the director of AI strategy at Pearson.
• Harvard computer science professor David Malan pioneered an AI tutor program in his classroom and says his students describe the chatbot as having "an infinite amount of patience" and "there's no question too dumb" for it.

Yes, but: The ability to ask endless questions without judgement or pushback isn't a proven way to learn.

• Most managers would prefer that an employee asked advice before making critical mistakes that could have been avoided.
• Managers claim to value curiosity in employees. If workers are secretly querying bots, they could be seen as lacking that critical skill.

"Turning to bots for mentorship poses a paradox," Julia Freeland-Fisher, director of education at the Clayton Christensen Institute, told Axios in an email. "Students and young professionals may gain more access to resources and support, but have less access to social and professional networks."

• "In a labor market where an estimated half of jobs and internships come through personal connections, underinvesting in networks has real costs," Freeland-Fisher said.

Zoom in: Chatbots are often confidently wrong in their answers, and advanced models are now hallucinating more, not less.

• Earlier chatbots refused to answer many sensitive questions, but that's changing, too.

The intrigue: A 2024 study showed that chatbots don't challenge our opinions, they reinforce them.

• "Even if a chatbot isn't designed to be biased, its answers reflect the biases or leanings of the person asking the questions," lead researcher Ziang Xiao, an assistant professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins, explained in an interview accompanying the study.
• "So really, people are getting the answers they want to hear."

Between the lines: Bots are efficient, but they can't replace human connection.

• "AI remains far less adept at navigating more interpersonally complicated communications in ways that are truly aligned with relationships," psychologist and University of Massachusetts professor Jean Rhodes writes in the Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring. Bots are "limited in their ability to consistently promote the sense of belonging and connection that contribute to mentees' wellbeing."
• "While one-off conversations with bots may sound trivial, even one-off human connections are crucial to unlocking opportunities," Freeland-Fisher told Axios in an email. "Research has long shown that we are more likely to get jobs through our 'weak-tie networks' than through our strong ties with close friends and family."
• "I just think we have to be really wary of the second order effects of all the conversations that [people are] not having with other humans," Freeland-Fisher told Axios.

Zoom out: Some educators and experienced workers could also learn to be less judgmental of their students and direct reports.

• 70% of employees say they encounter barriers to asking questions at work.
• If students prefer bots over teachers, that's a wake-up call, Hess told Axios. "That probably means we have some work to do on student-faculty relations."

The bottom line: The ubiquity of chatbots makes them an easy go-to for answers, but long-term mentoring and relationship-building still require humans on both sides of the table.