Students believe only AI can create or solve hard things, eroding motivation to build human skills

Summary

Students increasingly dismiss human achievement and creativity — assuming a practical-effects movie scene was AI and insisting 'there's no way it's possible without AI' — and generalize this to writing, research, and art. They conclude that only machines can do difficult things, so developing their own skills seems pointless. This is distinct from cheat-detection: it is a collapse of students' belief in human capability that undermines engagement, effort, and critical thinking. Teachers report heartbreak and lost instructional time trying to prove humans can create. No curriculum or product effectively teaches AI literacy in a way that restores students' confidence in human skill and motivates them to learn, making this a large, unsolved, worsening problem with clear demand from schools and parents.