‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom
Guardian essay by a children’s novelist and Oxford fellow who spends her working life in schools. Names the same break the Information Shock argument names in education: the student’s artifact no longer certifies the student’s understanding. Her formulation is the sharpest available, that this is the first time it is possible to produce an essay without reading the essay you wrote. Where she parts company is on the exchange itself. She holds that nothing is learned inside it, and offers refusal and reading as the remedy. That makes this the best public statement of the case that mode-two authorship substitutes for cognition rather than co-producing it, and worth answering rather than shelving. Her defense of the essay as a method of thinking rather than a proof of it is a live challenge to any account that treats the document as evidence only. Evidence base is uneven and needs checking before citation.
