Whether artificial intelligence enhances or reduces people's preferences for human capital investment is unclear from theoretical analysis. Empirical results demonstrate that faced with competition with AI, people tend to cut down education expenditure, rather than reinforcing human capital to improve competitiveness. Holding other factors constant, for a one-standard-deviation increase in AI, education spending drops by an average of 16.983%. This finding is robust to a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. The impact mechanisms are that AI reduces educational expenses by decreasing socioeconomic status, risk preferences and confidence about the future. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that improving labor relations, strengthening labor protection and enhancing social security help to mitigate AI's adverse effect on education investment.