Google recently published a set of (easy) study tips built around Gemini. They sound familiar: organise your materials, generate study guides, turn notes into audio, visualise concepts, test yourself, and identify gaps through feedback.

At first glance, this looks like a neat translation of learning science into practice. But look a bit closer and something else appears. These tips are less about how learning works and more about how AI can make studying feel easier.

And that matters, because in learning, easier is often not better at all!

1. Put everything in one place
   Organisation helps. It reduces unnecessary cognitive load and makes it easier to find what you need. But it is not a learning strategy. You can have perfectly organised notes and still not understand the content. This is preparation, not learning. So, next.
2. Generate study guides
   This is where things start to slip. Summarisation is often seen as effective, but the evidence is weak. Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) classify it as low utility compared to strategies like retrieval practice and spaced practice. That is when learners create summaries themselves. If an AI does it for you, you also lose the small benefit of actively processing the material. What remains is a neat summary with limited to no learning behind it. Yes, easy peasy. But with a hefty price.
3. Turn notes into audio or a podcast
   This adds variety, but also increases the risk of passivity. Listening feels productive, but often is not. There is little evidence that simply hearing content leads to strong learning outcomes, especially compared to more active approaches. It is convenient, but again convenience is not effectiveness.
4. Use visualisations and simulations
   This is one of the stronger suggestions. Well-designed visuals can support understanding, especially for complex or abstract content. This aligns with research on multimedia learning. But quality matters. Irrelevant or overloaded visuals can hinder learning rather than support it.
5. Test yourself
   This is where the list clearly aligns with strong evidence. Retrieval practice is one of the most robust findings in cognitive psychology. Actively recalling information strengthens memory and improves long-term retention. But details matter. Spacing, difficulty, and feedback determine how effective this really is. A few quick quizzes are not automatically enough. But again: it’s better to come up with test questions yourself, rather than letting AI do the job for you.
6. Identify gaps through feedback and dialogue
   This has real potential. Used well, AI can prompt explanation and reflection, which connects to metacognition and self-explanation. But again, the key is activity. If learners think, explain, and struggle a bit, this works. If the system simply provides answers, the learning disappears. And knowing what you don’t know yet is both hard for you and fo A.I.

Step back, and a pattern emerges. Two of the six tips are strongly supported by research. One can work under the right conditions. The others focus mainly on efficiency and ease.

What is largely missing are the core principles we know matter: spaced practice, interleaving, elaboration, and generative processing. In other words, the list prioritises reducing effort, while learning often depends on the right kind of effort. They call it themselves “6 easy ways to study.”

That tension is not new, but AI makes it more visible. Tools like Gemini are very good at producing outputs. The risk is that learners consume those outputs rather than engage in the processes that lead to understanding. So the question is not whether these tools can support learning. They can. The question is how they are used.

If AI replaces thinking, it will likely undermine learning.
If it supports thinking, it might enhance it.