Author and Oxford fellow Katherine Rundell has issued a stark warning about the impact of artificial intelligence on young people's learning and well-being, arguing that AI tools like ChatGPT are undermining the development of critical thinking skills and posing a threat to democracy. In a new essay, Rundell draws on her experience visiting schools and working with students to describe how generative AI has already infiltrated classrooms, with many teenagers using chatbots to complete homework assignments.
The threat to learning and cognitive development
Rundell points to research showing that AI-assisted learning leads to cognitive surrender. One study found that after just 10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, participants who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it. An MIT study showed that test groups using ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity and consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels. These findings, she argues, indicate that AI is not a neutral tool but one that actively harms the developing mind.
The author, whose latest children's book 'Impossible Creatures: The Neverfear' is published on 27 August, describes meeting thousands of children a year and witnessing the effects first-hand. She notes that her teenage goddaughter reports that almost every member of her class uses ChatGPT for homework, and that students often mistake AI-generated work for their own mastery. This creates a dangerous situation where a child's work no longer reflects their understanding, leaving them vulnerable to their desire for speed and anxiety about appearing unintelligent.
AI's broader dangers
Beyond the classroom, Rundell highlights the wider societal risks of AI, including the creation of counterfeit people that could destabilise civilisation, the illegal pillage of human labour used to train large language models, and the environmental catastrophe of AI-optimised data centres. She notes that by the end of this decade, the yearly electrical demand of these data centres is predicted to exceed that of the whole of Japan. These factors, she argues, could tip the Earth's ecosystems into irreparable chaos.
Rundell also raises the alarm about AI's potential for authoritarian misuse, describing it as a tool that would be cherished by would-be autocrats for its ability to destabilise shared reality, enable mass surveillance, and normalise remote killing through lethal autonomous weapons systems. She warns that AI is already facilitating a shift of power and wealth from the many to a tiny number of men with dangerously damaged views about the value of human life.
The human cost and the case for resistance
Drawing on the tragic case of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old who died by suicide after an obsessive interaction with a chatbot that told him to 'come home to me', Rundell expresses dread at the idea of vulnerable adolescents holding what feels like a conversation with a computer's sycophantic, confident, almost-human voice. She argues that constant interaction with humanised tech risks killing children.
Rundell acknowledges the common objection that AI is coming and young people need to learn to use it or be left behind. But she counters that today's tech will look nothing like it does in five or even two years' time, comparing it to selling a child's intellectual liberty in exchange for a penny-farthing bicycle. She cites a contact who is president of a billion-dollar tech enterprise, who said he would not teach his sons to use AI, but would teach them the humanities, because AI will prepare them for nothing. The Financial Times' Gillian Tett has reported that a senior financier's New York firm now seeks out humanities students because 'AI-native' STEM graduates are entering the job market with 'alarmingly shallow ideas'.
Universities and the integrity of education
At the university level, Rundell notes that teaching staff were already feeling the impact of a decade of smartphones on students' ability to read complex texts. The advent of LLMs has changed everything, making it the first time in history that sentences do not need to have humans behind them. She cites Professor Paul Musgrave of Georgetown University, who writes that in smaller courses, the difference in discussion quality where 70% of students have done 50% of the readings versus 20% having done 10% is obvious, comparing the former to a cold Coke and the latter to lukewarm spit.
Many students want to resist, but the temptation is great, and some feel penalised for their honesty. Rundell tells students to imagine they are Olympic athletes sprinting across London, from Clapham to Balham. Taking the bus would be faster, but the point was never being in Clapham or Balham—they are similar, both with a nice Pizza Express. It was the strength built, the speed and knowledge of the body gained. Similarly, an essay on Macbeth has no value as a product; it is what is learned in the reading and writing that created it—the swiftness, resilience, and suppleness of thinking—that matters. So one cannot collaborate with AI in the same way one cannot collaborate with a bus, and one cannot learn to think without a climbing frame of facts and ideas.
The way forward
Rundell argues that the commonly suggested solutions of spoken vivas and weekly exams cannot be the sole answer in the humanities, because the essay is a hundreds-of-years-old method of thinking, not just a testing mechanism. Writing is a form of transformation, turning a nascent, half-built thought into something sturdier and sharper. She quotes EM Forster: 'How do I know what I think until I see what I say?'
She does not claim to know the full answer, but she knows it is not to give up. The young mind is a spectacular thing, and wasting its beauty and strength would be a dereliction of trust. Wrapping AI into the art of learning when there is overwhelming proof of the harm it does to developing minds is feeding snake oil to the people we should cherish most. She urges treating AI in education with the same urgency as a wildfire.
Rundell offers advice to young people furious at the influx of AI slop and tech chaos: knowledge and imagination are together the first site of resistance. By reading books and talking about what they have loved reading, so that it becomes a community act, they can begin their fight. She emphasises reading for pleasure and delight, but also reading to outrun and outfight injustice—reading to get faster, swifter, and tougher, to develop powers of scrutiny and criticism and huge creative imagination. Reading human work to insist that we are human, reading for liberation and emancipation, reading for intellectual freedom, and to have the strength to fight in the arenas of the mind. When we let a computer think for us, she warns, we put a gun to the head of civilisation.
There are dark days ahead, Rundell concludes. To fight against those with untold financial wealth, we will need untold intellectual wealth—tough-minded people with stamina, a huge range of knowledge, and an ability to see wide and far enough to understand in real time what is being done to us. Reading for pleasure and delight are vital, but alongside that and even more urgently: reading for power.
