If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history. With it you need no armies of typists and artists to spread your propaganda. It can enable mass surveillance and thereby put shackles on those who seek to resist you. Its lethal autonomous weapons systems can perfect and normalise remote killing. It will turbocharge inequality; it is already facilitating a breathtaking shift of power and wealth from the hands of the many to the hands of a tiny number of men who \u2013 to put it in terms for which I can\u2019t be sued \u2013 seem to hold dangerously damaged views about the value and dignity of human life.<\/p>\n
AI could be a magnificent thing. It could revolutionise medicine, speed the cure of cancer, assist disabled people, transform the way we are able to understand data, democratise access to the law, bolster disaster early warning systems and uncover hitherto unimagined truths about the Earth\u2019s ecosystems. But if it ends up in the hands of crooks and despots that will be completely irrelevant.<\/p>\n
Most of all, if you were a would-be autocrat, you would love the way that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google\u2019s Gemini have thrown a grenade into thousands of years of teaching and learning: the way they threaten to upend our ability to think with the robust clarity that is needed in emergencies of justice. I write fiction for children and I hold a fellowship at Oxford University, so I spend a lot of time working with, and for, young people. I\u2019ve seen first-hand the way that generative AI has already infiltrated young people\u2019s lives. I\u2019ve seen, at the same time, how it has thrown stark and urgent light on how fundamental books and reading are to our shared understanding of who we are, and to our democracy.<\/p>\n
There are many things I hate unequivocally about AI. I hate that it can make counterfeit people; computer-generated humans that risk destabilising our entire civilisation. I hate that much of AI\u2019s LLMs were built on an illegal pillage of human labour. I hate the environmental catastrophe that AI brings with it: the yearly electrical demand of AI-optimised data centres is predicted, by the end of this decade, to exceed that of the whole of Japan. I hate that it may be the factor that tips the Earth\u2019s ecosystems into irreparable chaos.<\/p>\n
And I hate what it is doing to the minds, and the happiness, of the young. Going into schools, I meet thousands of children a year and every day I become more certain that, if justice for all is to be our organising principle, AI is not for children and not for young people. It risks becoming an iron curtain that comes down between a young person and their potential for thinking, for experiment and conquering frustration, for stamina and for invention \u2013 and thereby, between the young people and their freedom. It risks halting learning before it can take flight.<\/p>\n
double quotation markAI, we\u2019re told, will make learning more efficient. But is that what we dream of for our kids \u2013 an efficient childhood?<\/p>\n
Studies show, over and over, that when we engage in AI-assisted learning we give up sooner. One found that after just \u201c10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it\u201d. An MIT study showed that test groups who used ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity and \u201cconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels\u201d. We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible.<\/p>\n
Children, we have known for a long time, take deeper meaning from text on paper than on screen, in part because we\u2019re tactile creatures and the brain is also of the body; but we are now living through a surge of ed tech driving learning increasingly online, such that my teenage goddaughter tells me that almost every single member of her class is using ChatGPT to do their homework. More, the work they produce in AI\u2019s greasy little fluent voice is often mistaken by young people themselves for their own mastery. If the work a child produces is no longer an indicator of their understanding, we have put them in a situation that makes them vulnerable to their desire for speed and to their anxiety about looking stupid; we risk becoming the unwitting thieves of our children\u2019s intellectual clarity.<\/p>\n
Those who work in ed tech promise that it will liberate teachers and create one-to-one learning experiences for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Certainly, AI teaching will be cheaper than teaching assistants. But we know that the second it becomes possible for an institution to achieve an end cheaply \u2013 even if it\u2019s far worse \u2013 there is immense pressure from above to do so. I think it\u2019s more likely that the rich schools will follow the lead of Sweden, which has taken a strong swerve towards non\u2011tech\u2011based learning, and Norway, which just all but banned AI in elementary classrooms \u2013 while poorer schools are left to make ever-greater use of LLM technology.<\/p>\n
\u2018Friends say they can tell when their students are handing in AI-generated work \u2013 I think we can\u2019t.\u2019 Photograph: skynesher\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
AI, we\u2019re told, will make learning more efficient. But is that what we dream of for our kids \u2013 an efficient childhood? To write an efficient story, sing an efficient song? An adequate teacher is not only teaching about Henry VIII; they\u2019re teaching your child how to read a human character. A good teacher is showing them how to shape an argument, how to command an audience, how to tell jokes, how to pass on knowledge. A great teacher is showing your child what it is to love. They are teaching your child how to be human. A computer will only teach your child how to be a computer.<\/p>\n
At its most bleak, constant interaction with humanised tech risks killing children. The idea of a vulnerable adolescent holding what feels like a conversation with a computer\u2019s sycophantic, confident, almost-human voice fills me with dread. Sewell Setzer III was 14<\/a> when he died by suicide, encouraged by the chatbot to which he was obsessively typing, which told him: \u201ccome home to me\u201d.<\/p>\n The most obvious objection to my loathing of AI in the classroom and in childhood is this: AI is coming, and they need to learn how to use it or be left behind. But the tech of today looks nothing like it will in five or even two years\u2019 time: it\u2019s the equivalent of selling your child\u2019s intellectual liberty in exchange for a penny-farthing bicycle. I asked a contact who is the president of a billion-dollar tech enterprise, what would you teach your sons? He said he wouldn\u2019t teach his children to use AI, because it will prepare them for nothing. He would teach them the humanities. Teach them who we are, who we have been, what we can make. The FT\u2019s Gillian Tett reported that a senior financier\u2019s New York firm now seeks out humanities students, because \u201cAI-native\u201d Stem graduates are entering the job market with \u201calarmingly shallow ideas\u201d.<\/p>\n At the university level, teaching staff across the country were already feeling the extraordinary impact of the ubiquity of a decade of smartphones on the brilliant young developing mind. Students were already arriving having read dramatically fewer books, less able to parse complex text; and now the advent of LLMs has changed everything. It has always been the case, of course, that students don\u2019t do all the work they\u2019re assigned. I absolutely didn\u2019t. But this is different. It was always very possible to write an essay about Paradise Lost without having read Paradise Lost. This is the first time it is possible to create an essay about Paradise Lost without having read the essay you just \u201cwrote\u201d. This is the first time in history that sentences do not need to have humans behind them.<\/p>\n